Stepping On Worm
by Perfect Lionheart
Summary: Worm is a grimdark superhero universe where anything that can go wrong, will. It's nasty, and would require whole books to adequately describe how screwed up it is. But even appearing there with no powers, it is still possible to fix that mess. So, appear penniless and powerless in that environment.
1. Chapter 1

Stepping on Worm  
Chapter One

by Skysaber  
aka Perfect Lionheart

OoOoO

Worm is a grimdark superhero universe where anything that can go wrong, will. It's nasty, and would require whole books to adequately describe how screwed up it is. But even appearing there with no powers, it is still possible to fix that mess.

So, appear penniless and powerless in that environment. And go to work.

OoOoO

Jared awoke on board a bus surrounded by other school kids. Doing a quick self-examination, plus catching the bus window at the right angle to see a bit of his reflection, showed he was the same age as the rest, either at the top end of Elementary school age, or just starting Junior High.

Either way, clearly a pre-teen. Ten or eleven, Hogwarts starting age, basically. That, or graduation age for a Konoha genin. The girls on the bus around him were flat as bean poles, except one or two early starters, and most kids didn't even know what a pimple was yet.

He himself was dressed nicely but not expensively, in winter garb and with a backpack full of school supplies at his feet. The class schedule was a wadded up note crammed deep in a narrow pocket, so obviously had not been glanced at in months. That alone placed him somewhere near the middle of the school year, which matched with the heavy coat he was wearing, as well as the clumps of snow visible on the ground outside.

Other than normal wear on the books and empty notebooks, there was no other clue as to his situation, not even a school ID card. No wallet, no phone, no superspy tools, no home address or lunch card, not even a note explaining his situation.

Checking out the other passengers, they were all ignoring him. However as he looked around he saw the rather obvious clues that indicated this was a city bus, not a school specific one - that, and the rather narrow age ranges of those kids around him, told him that he was at least among Junior High students, instead of sharing space with kindergartners.

Frankly, the kindergartners would have been an improvement. Little kids were nice and willing to answer all sorts of questions guilelessly that older kids would mock or ridicule. Things like, "What city is this?" "What school are we going to?" or "What country are we in?"

All useful information that he did not currently have.

Jared made the effort necessary to get up and move among the other occupants while the bus was still moving in order to make it to where the bus schedules were kept handy for this and all of the connecting lines, grabbing one for each since he didn't even know what bus he was on.

At least they cheered him up by offering the first bit of useful information. He was in some city called Brockton Bay.

He'd never heard of it.

So that made first priority information. Thankfully, he saw the answer right outside of the bus' window, and immediately pulled the cord requesting that the bus make the next stop, which it did so immediately.

Jared got a lot of funny looks from a lot of people when he snagged up his backpack and made for the doors of the bus, both the bus driver and the other kids his age giving him the 'I know this isn't what you are supposed to be doing' glances as he separated himself from the pack, but he didn't care about that.

Making sure to exit by the front door of the bus gave the little redhead opportunity to turn around and note what bus line he had been on before it had a chance to pull away, and pulling out a mechanical pencil he made note of that on the appropriate schedule, then he noted the time. Taking care to check out the nearest cross streets even gave him what direction it had been going, which he made note of too, just in case those data points turned out to be useful.

Then he was darting up the steps to the Brockton Bay Central Library, through the doors into the well-heated building beyond, and immediately diving into heavy research with the kind of purposeful 'dedicated student' air that made adults automatically assume that whatever he was doing, it was respectable and he had official permission to be doing it.

Sometimes not trying to hide was the best form of concealment.

Still, it took him almost no time at all to find the newspaper racks and nail down several important details as to his new situation. One was that the city of Brockton Bay was in New England, USA, which the newspapers claiming it was in New Hampshire not terribly far from Boston.

That established an important baseline on which to work from, as clearly if he'd been in one of the really wiggy universes like Warhammer, or Equestria, things would have different names. So wherever he was, it was based on the classic Earth.

It couldn't *be* the classic earth, because the newspaper front pages were filled with news about the various parahuman goings-on that were going on.

From newspapers he switched to the computers, finding an open station easily. With the general concepts revealed by a quick skim of several newspaper headlines he at least had a better idea of what to search for next, and it took him no time at all to prove that whatever superhuman world this was, it wasn't DC or Marvel, as none of the familiar names turned up anything on a search.

A librarian strolled by, clucking happily at the busily working student, having checked over his shoulder and found him on the local version of wikipedia earnestly devouring the serious subject of history.

Sometimes respectability was it's own shield, as if Jared had gone for the magazine racks and started to read comics or sports, he would have been rousted within minutes; just like if he'd been cruising a mall or hanging out on a street corner, authority figures would have been on him at once. But nicely dressed, being quiet and studying history, he passed completely without notice.

Jared snorted as, through the corner of his eye he caught the librarian who had passed him by rousting a gang member from another booth who, from their conversation, been trying to break through the computer's protection so he could surf porn.

~Idiot. Try thinking with something other than your gonads,~ the studious redhead directed his mental scorn towards the gang member as a security officer was called to help the librarian haul him away.

Although the same security officer gave Jared a glance, his age being obvious and this being a school day, the ten year old was quite obvious working, not goofing off. In fact Jared made an extra effort, those few seconds he was under examination, to drag out one of his notebooks and a homework sheet and start obviously working on some school project. At that point the guard walked away, convinced that no kid would skip school just for the purpose of doing homework.

As the guard walked away, Jared hid a grin. This was routine for him. He'd been bored to tears with the slow pace of public school lessons, and so for years had worked out the best place to skip class was the local library, reading books. Actually, the only place better than the public library had to be the school's own library, when it had one. For some reason no one suspected the quiet, studious kid who came in to read and study was skipping class to do so. Those habits were appallingly easy for him to slip back into now.

Over the next several hours the librarian checked in on him with increasingly large gaps in between visits, as each time she found him hard at work learning. Although her semi-regular visits were enough to scare off a brown-haired girl who had come in around lunchtime, and obviously did not care for the scrutiny.

By her age and height, mid-teens and nearly six foot, that girl would ordinarily been able to pass herself off as a scrawny adult from a distance, so if she was ducking out of high school, which she probably was, the amount of attention drawn would have been atypical for her, but for a person of Jared's current ten or so years, that attention was mandatory.

A full day of heavy reading got him some serious, if broad-scope, information.

He found the divergence point from normal pretty easily.

Back during early 1980 the first supervillains appeared. It was around Afghanistan, during the Soviet-Afghan War. The Chinese funded resistance movement had been shattered the year before, only to be suddenly regalvanized under the leadership of a man of solid gold, dressed in robes reminiscent of a Chinese emperor, and his first act on the world stage was to bury a Russian tank division in glass using waves of fire from his hands.

This new golden man spoke little, but when asked his name he had reportedly replied Tian. So the Chinese proudly proclaimed he was called Tian Shu Zhu, after their god of sun and wind.

With him on the battlefield, Chinese troops never lost. They were squashing the Soviets by the numbers and would have won quite handily save that only months after Tian's first appearance the Soviets got their own cape to equal him. She was black from head to toe, and not African black but inhumanly black, like the surface of ink or tar or a starless void, and she wore a gown in the Russian Imperial style composed solely of ice crystals.

They called her Lady Winter, and boasted that Russians never lost a war when winter was on their side. She was the first cape to appear after Tian, but far from the last.

And the first place they clashed was in Afghanistan.

Russian troops had seized and held the cities. Then there were two rebel groups, the one funded by China had been resoundingly defeated in open battle the year before, and would have disbanded entirely had Tian not appeared. Then there was the rebel group funded by America and the West, which quickly dwindled to insignificance as both China and Russia started to throw any capes they could find, draft or hire into the conflict.

Thus, the War in Afghanistan became known as the First Cape War, (he noted 'cape' being the local slang term for anyone with super powers).

Technically, War in Afghanistan still was the First Cape War, because they hadn't stopped fighting there yet, over thirty years later. Although the landscape of that country had been blasted and rearranged so many times they didn't even bother to map it anymore.

And it was pretty much a stalemate. Where Tian brought firepower to any battlefield, Lady Winter brought wit. She was impossible to outmaneuver, and so cunning were her strategies that people joked that when she was around, the only things Tian hit were the targets of his practice range.

Both were national treasures, although still clearly villains, as they tended to act like a mix of all the worst parts of Doctor Doom and Darth Vader - and the worst part was that came pretty darn close to what those countries each expected in a leader, so they were fine with that. Each could easily have seized total control of the country they represented if either had been at all interested in anything save running their armies.

Now the two clashed but rarely in person. After years of fighting both had settled down and been more or less content to sit back and lead. But from the point of their arrival other super beings began appearing across the globe, more or less evenly spread by geography.

As for the rest of the world, bleak was a good word for it.

This world was not a happy place. Government had somehow gotten involved in the heroing business, and managed it just about as well as they did the local DMV - which is to say, about as badly as something can be managed. Villains outnumbered heroes by a significant margin. Some sources said three to one, others claimed eleven to one. Either way, the heroes did not have any kind of success rate worth remarking upon, not like he'd expect anyway.

Put a villain or a catastrophe in front of Batman, or any other classic comic book hero, either DC or Marvel, and the problem is going to get fixed. Not so here.

On this world, the heroes had about as much effect on villain crime rates as the police of a classic earth did in the war on drugs. They made some arrests now and then, making a big deal about each of them, made some places marginally safer than others, but overall Inspector Gadget would make for a fine example of success and ingenuity compared to the government-run hero teams. They were a joke.

Also, Jared got the strong impression that the government's attitude was "work for us or be a villain", which would explain both the vast disparity in numbers (when frankly most kids growing up would want to be heroes), and the government-run teams ineffectual natures, as throw enough bureaucracy on it and you can stifle anything.

Even Superman would be a putz if there was a whole book of procedures that had to be followed, regulations hamstringing him left and right, and he had to fill out reams of paperwork before taking any action. That sort of thing would drive nearly anyone to be a villain, just to escape the "yet another wageslave" approach to having super-powers.

But enough about that, Jared had enough experience with government corruption to see all of the signs here. You did not have to have worked with NERV in an Evangelion universe, to know better than to trust government outright, as too often bad guys took over the show. Even in the DC universe, Lex Luther became president. And Marvel's civil war started with government deciding they needed to run the hero show, when one of the greatest, long-term villains of the setting was a senator.

When heroes start taking orders from villains, everyone suffers.

Jared was canny enough to recognize those very same warning signs here. Several very dark and dismal universes started to go bad only once the villains got in charge - and frankly, this looked like one of them. He couldn't think of anything else that could explain how maximally screwed up everything was, especially in the hero situation.

Bleak indeed.

Basically it was an entire world full of bad guys, and he had yet to find a good one. Frankly it was giving off waaay too many vibes reminding him of the Evangelion universe. They even had periodic monster attacks causing massive casualties and property damage!

It was the sort of thing to make one long for a giant robot team, but of course they didn't have one.

It was enough to cause Jared's eyes to narrow at the screen. This, he concluded, could not be allowed to stand.

Before he'd been running on basic principles. If lost, find out where you are. That was the same whether you had just moved to a new city, or whether you got catapulted into a realm of chaos and madness like Warhammer. Survival depended heavily on understanding one's environment. There hadn't been any need to get his emotions involved because really, why bother getting emotional over a problem when you could instead be fixing it?

A broken shoelace is not resolved by getting upset about it. Don't even bother. Just replace it. And, once you'd been through as many terrors and trials as he had, lots of problems started to feel fairly minor in comparison. He'd been tortured by experts and lost everything he'd ever loved. And that was *BEFORE* he'd started writing stories! Getting tossed into a totally unfamiliar universe was relaxing by comparison.

Now though? This place needed fixing. It needed it in the worst possible way.

And, though he tried not to get in the habit of quoting villains too often, in this case one quote by the Batman movie's Joker was just too apt. "This town needs an enema!"

Yeah, among the things this place desperately needed was someone to invent a sense of humor for it.

After several hours of nonstop study learning the basic principles of how and why powers worked, according to the experts, Jared called a momentary halt, leaning back and giving a minor thought to the growing hunger of his body before dismissing it entirely. Food was of trivial importance when contrasted with obtaining basic local knowledge, or else how were you to know if you were the equivalent of a Jew to the local Nazis?

And this world HAD Nazis. Lots of them. Europe was basically lost to them.

No, find out what the danger spots are first, the things that set people off, because only by knowing them can you avoid them.

On a Marvel world, don't let anyone think you are a mutant. In DC, don't go near Gotham. Anywhere else, find out what the local equivalent 'gotchas' are before you step in one.

Not that he was going to say he was any kind of expert on the local environment. Even after spending hours getting a read on their situation, Jared was quite willing to acknowledge that his new knowledge was a summary at most. One day, no matter how well spent, wasn't going to give much more than an overview. Months were required if you want to know enough to pass as a native, and years to be any kind of expert on a world.

He was never going to be expert, and that did not bother him at all. No, the thing that distinctly concerned him was as his research time ate up the day, the question grew more and more concerning: what was he going to do with himself once the library closed?

That was sufficient to cause him to shift focus, putting long term details and knowledge on the back burner for now, and focusing more on his immediate situation. Now he was regretting not having taken that bus all of the way to his school, as there he could have gotten into the office, made some excuse to 'confirm' his home address, and thus known where he was supposed to spend the night, if he had any supposed relatives, etc. But such an option was closed to him for now, although with the notes he'd made about the bus route and time, that was probably something he could do tomorrow.

Until then, he had a night approaching and just a few hours to prepare for it before he lost access to his major source of research. And even the most preliminary skims of the news proved that Brockton Bay was not the sort of place one wanted to spend a night outdoors.

As near as Jared could tell, he had been dropped in place without powers, and penniless, in a world where entire cities got destroyed on a quarterly basis. And, of all of the places that he might have been dropped, barring those strictly uninhabitable, Brockton Bay was in the running for the worst according to the online chat. The local Gotham.

One does not try to sleep on a park bench in Gotham at night. There are less painful forms of suicide than that.

Newly spurred on to study, Jared delved more deeply into the city specifically, looking for data he could use, and that brought him quickly enough to references to the local heroes and villain teams (and he made note again that this world's slang appeared to be to call anyone with superpowers 'capes') with links to something called Parahuman Online, which a tentative foray into quickly had the redhaired child wishing that he'd discovered it hours ago.

It had a wealth of information, and Jared had barely dipped into it before coming to a complete stop, staring at the screen. Brockton Bay had a villain team (actually they had so many it was scary), but among the local villains were a couple of losers called Uber and Leet, who were not taken seriously by anyone. Gaming geeks with super powers, but that was not what floored him.

No, Jared was staring at the screen too stunned for words because he saw that Leet's power was that of an inventor, who was supposed to be able to make anything once.

ANYTHING!

Obviously, some people were just not using their imaginations properly if they thought that was a lame power. The eager new arrival spent the next forty five minutes avidly going over the duo's list of crimes and accomplishments before he dared conclude that Leet had never made a device like he'd want. Then the boards made it stupidly easy to get in touch with the supposedly wanted villain team.

So Jared whipped up a quick throwaway email address, and sent:

"Subject: New Game, Start?  
To: Uber and Leet  
From: New Player

I've got a game for you to beat. Are you interested in the challenge?"

Jared sent it off with confidence. The boards even mentioned that sometimes Uber and Leet worked for other villains, so he was confident they'd be easy to convince. Ready to spend the rest of the evening until the library's closing doing more research, he settled in to more learning, only to be surprised to receive an email alert barely minutes later.

Their reply was somewhat affronted, so he sent back:

"Subject: Re: New Game, Start?  
To: Uber and Leet  
From: New Player

Not interested in conflict. I've literally got a game for you to play, which, if successful, could result in money, money, money by the pound as the least of all possible rewards. The really fun stuff doesn't bear mentioning over email."

A minute later, he was forced to send another reply:

"Subject: Re: New Game, Start?  
To: Uber and Leet  
From: New Player

No, I'm not offering anything pervy. Get your minds out of the gutter!

Look, according to the boards you guys sometimes take mercenary contracts, right? While I am not going to admit to anything even vaguely illegal online, if I had such intentions, I am offering to hire you both to use your abilities for mutual profit and gain. And it's even game related.

Everyone keeps their pants on. No 'no touch' zones are violated, and the yaoi fangirls would be bitterly disappointed over how utterly uninteresting they would find my plans."

Sending that off with a frustrated sigh, at least he got his confirmation back quickly that they were willing to set up a meet to discuss it in person.

Now if only he could figure out where this Fugly Bob's place was.

OoOoO

The glass door swung open easily from the weight of her leaning on it, and the warm air of the inside of the fast food place greeted her face as the girl halfway limped, partly hopped to a chair at one of the mostly-clean tables.

Taylor winced as she sat down, not even recognizing the restaurant she was in, but the pain in her foot demanded her attention, so she relieved it by taking a seat.

Being tripped at school, she'd nearly fallen, but only saved herself with a slight wrench to one ankle. It hurt, but wouldn't have been that bad if she'd been able to rest it at the library after leaving school like she'd originally planned.

But no, the librarian had been hovering today, and rather get caught by a truant officer she had made haste out, only to discover that her bus pass had been in the pocket of the folder that Sophia and the other bullies had stolen, so she'd been in for a long walk home. And what had started as a minor ankle twinge was now throbbing as though really hurt.

"Excuse me?"

Taylor looked up from rubbing at her swelling ankle and couldn't believe her eyes when she met eyes with Amy Dallon, alias Panacea, most famous healing cape in the world, who had apparently entered the restaurant with her sister Glory Girl. And here she was nursing an injury right in their path!

"Are you alright?" came the gentle voice and concerned tones of the healer.

Taylor wordlessly shook her head, holding out her ankle, too in awe of being so close to so famous a person to respond adequately by voice, and afraid of squeaking if she tried.

Taking that as permission enough, Panacea laid her fingers on the swollen ankle thus exposed. Moments later Panacea's eyes widened a bit and she controlled her reaction to avoid outing this person as her power fed her information on the person she was healing, as she realized the girl was another cape.

OoOoO

The abandoned warehouse that was their current lair wasn't much, and certainly not worth fixing up given how often they had to move base suddenly. But at least the dust had been controlled by spraying down the small office areas with a garden hose before moving in.

Uber was surfing with a sandwich in one hand and a slurpee on the desk beside the mouse and a half empty bag of chips when he blinked and called out, "Hey, Leet, look at this."

"I'm *busy*!" came the reply of the tinker actively tinkering in the next room.

"You'll want to see this, some dude is calling us out." Uber replied, taking a firm bite of his sandwich.

"Just one more weld."

Moments later Leet's head came around the corner of the doorframe that led to his personal laboratory and workshop, forehead still creased by the strap of the welding mask he'd been wearing for hours. "What's up? I thought you were going to leave me alone until I finished the Voltron rig?"

"You started that?" Uber looked up, nonplused, as he stopped leaning back and took his feet off the second chair next to the desk. "I thought we'd agreed to go with a battlemech instead?"

"I know, I just couldn't resist the: one robot, five lions," the scrawny tinker returned with a grin. "We've got the space, and with the new smelter we've got all of the steel I want, just picking up scraps from the trainyard and boat graveyard. So why not go really big?"

"Maybe because we'd need five pilots and have only got two?" Uber asked.

"Oh," Leet's grin vanished away as he recalled what the winning argument had been. "Yeah, but where are we going to get the plastics I'd need for the myomar fibers for an Altas or a Devastator?"

Uber shrugged. "Maybe we can score some from another empty warehouse Anyway, take a look at this."

"Wouldn't be enough to build an Urbanmech," Leet groused under his breath as he read over his teammate and best friend's shoulder. "Some bastard's calling us out?"

"Looks like that," Uber quickly typed a reply.

"Now that's a come on," Leet decided, once they had a reply back moments later.

"Sure looks like one," Uber agreed, confidently sending a stinging rejoinder across the web.

Both broke out laughing when they got a reply.

"Okay, so it wasn't a come-on," Leet wiped a tear of laughter from his eye.

"So it's a job. Do we look into it" Uber's eyes glittered as he reached for the mouse.

"With an opening like that, how could we not?" Leet grinned.

OoOoO

Fugly Bob's was one of those wonders, a small shop not driven out of business by the chain stores. That sort of place survived on their quality and local reputation.

And they were worth it.

Jared had arrived hungry, walking in through the doors to find a single mom embarrassed by her bratty kid throwing a tantrum. She'd just agreed to get the whiny little snot a chicken burger instead of the perfectly good plain burger lying untouched on the booth table before him, when Jared appeared at her elbow, all helpful and innocence, offering in a polite and respectful tone to carry that burger to the trash for her if they didn't want it.

Yes, it was begging, but it netted him a burger, for which he was grateful. And it really was that good.

His meal was about halfway demolished when the supervillains he'd contacted arrived. Uber and Leet came in costume. Jared guessed he should have been expecting that, the call out was to their superhero identities after all. His seat was near by the front door, so before they could call much attention to themselves, he called out a movie quote just enough for them to hear, "Greetings, my excellent friends."

Uber and Leet glanced at each other, obviously a bit put off, not expecting to be met by a kid, before Uber's eyes started sparkling and he shrugged and declared "Leetness knows no age," and they both slid into the booth with him.

Actually, if Jared was any judge of character (which he was) their comfort level even increased; to be dealing with a younger kid gave them the sense of advantage and put them at ease, where an older person would be viewed as more of a credible threat.

Part of Jared's clothing was a pair of gargoyle sunglasses he hadn't worn in years, but between them and the bulky winter weather clothing that everyone around wore, could be taken for a costume just as easily as it passed for normal clothes.

Bright sun on snow did call for sunglasses, after all.

"Be excellent to each other," the ten year old redhead smirked as he gestured the much older teens to their seats as they took places in the booth. He was not as strong on video game quotes as he ought to be for optimal dealing with these guys, so he was gambling on the fact that the line between movies and games had grown awfully blurry. Most good movies inspired games, and quite a few popular games had movies based on them.

"Party on, dudes." Uber grinned, showing that he'd caught the movie reference.

"Would you like to play a game?" Jared asked before either of the two villains could question him, controlling the flow of the conversation. The particular intonation and cadence being very specific to another movie.

Leet blanched. "It's not going to be global thermonuclear war, is it?" showing that he too had caught on to the movie quotes.

The newcomer to this planet glanced at both teens through his sunglasses, before tossing a file folder onto the table in between them. "Your mission, should you choose to accept it."

It had been easy enough to empty out one of the school folders in his backpack and get a few sheets of almost-new copier paper from the library. That had given him materials to put his pens to good use, and draw up exactly what he wanted them to build, along with how, broken down so the steps to conclusion even came with a sort of game adventure feel.

One thing Jared's research had made clear was that this was not the sort of a world where a homeless, penniless ten-year-old could expect to survive. Not without powers, anyway.

So he'd plotted out how to solve that little problem.

Leet's eyes grew wide and round as he read over the material, and he started twitching with excitement as he declared, "Dude that is SO epic!"

Jared finished the last of the burger before the duo were done reading his papers. When they looked up, he challenged. "So, do you take the blue pill? Or is it the red pill, and I show you how deep the rabbit hole goes?"

"We are SOO in on this!" Leet declared.

OoOoO

Author's Notes:

So a Worm AU (not like fanfiction isn't *all* AU, but still).

The silly thing is, I had no intention of ever touching the Worm universe, just like it can be hard to convince someone to pick up a dog turd bare handed.

Still, a lot of people had been making a lot of noise over some self-insert challenge to the universe, and I am very interested in self-insert stories. But even so I was avoiding Worm until The Grum started in on the genre. Now he is one of those people who are worth reading no matter what he writes. He can turn a dog turd into a diamond.

Exposed that far, I ventured just a touch further to read some of the self-insert storylines, and some of those were good. I even went so far as to look over version one of the Worm CYOA self-insert challenge. But aside from a few vague notions, that would have been the end of it, as the whole place is just dripping with evil. Except one of my other few friends decided to write his own response to that challenge, then invite me to do the same using his setup to see how our works would turn out different.

So, eh, dripping with evil just became a target rich environment. I'd say who this friend was, but that would give away the build I am using. Although I did make a few changes to my friend's initial setup, mostly to make it fantastically more difficult, as it was just not enough of a challenge to tackle this world, starting out with my own superpowers.

Oh, and those of you in the know have already noticed there are two of the ultimate big bad in operation, not just one. So yes, I made "the Lovers" addition to my setup. So we have both ultimate villains it takes dozens of worlds worth of heroes to defeat lying around, and the one hasn't lobotomized himself for grief over the absence of the other. So both are at full health and full power, acting in concert to stir up conflict and carry out their plan.

It just wouldn't be fair not to give my enemies a sporting chance, after all.

I haven't even bothered to spend any of the points I ought to have gotten for that, either. Maybe I will later, but first I want to kick this world a few times in the teeth just using my ability to reason things out.


	2. Chapter 2

Stepping on Worm  
Chapter Two

by Skysaber  
aka Perfect Lionheart

OoOoO

The downloads were free. The software was in even better shape than Jared had dared hope for, as apparently one of the private sites had already done most of the work for him.

Better yet, Uber and Leet already knew what to get, where to get it, as well as how to assemble it. But that was just the start. These two were dedicated gamers. They knew all of the tricks, cheats, popular additions, and the unfinished area that you needed a special patch to enter because it was never implemented.

They were in their domain. In fact, if Jared was not mistaken, they'd taken and merged something like fourteen different versions of the game, and cherry-picked the bits they liked.

They were, in short, taking his raw idea and turning it into a work of gamer art. It was enough to cause the newcomer to quietly, humbly, ask for a copy - not for the plan, but just to play!

The redhead was willing to wait and let Uber do all of the programming so as not to burn out one of Leet's precious tinker slots, but Leet was not to be denied this opportunity, and working at tinker speed had all of the specialized programming done before the last of the lengthy downloads had finished.

Although they did throw Jared for a loop when a busily programming Leet shot off the quick question, "So, Command & Conquer: Generals. Which is your side?"

Jared blinked, surprised by the question. "Well, the chain gun is my favorite defensive emplacement, with the healing towers a close second, so China. Probably the nuke general, as he doesn't lose anything I can't live without, and he is the only Chinese general whose air force is worth anything."

Leet nodded and finished his coding.

Then it was time to move out.

The local college was not all that prestigious, nor even a stand-alone name, just the Brockton Bay campus of the New Hampshire College system. Still, the campus was in a good part of town. It had all of that classy New England architecture going for it, and in spring and summer it probably had beautiful green lawns and broad, leafy trees.

Right now the roads were still a little slushy, edged on both sides by dirty snow. And the empty branches of those trees clawed angrily at the overcast sky.

But as Uber drove their rented vehicle, heater blasting, into the underground parking garage, presenting a forged pass to the lot attendant, and getting waved in the back doors, they found security was light indeed. They didn't even need any of Jared's special plans to get access to the campus IT department. They just asked directions to the building, walked right in and sat down in the cheap chairs of one of the usual bland conference rooms.

Leet and Jared began treating themselves to free hot cocoa from the complimentary packets along with the hot water feature of the coffee machine, kicking back and relaxing in not-quite-comfortable plastic chairs while Uber left to do some scouting. With the blinds down and door closed, which they had been even before they arrived, there was no way to even know the kids were there unless someone stuck their head in, or they made noise - which they weren't planning to do.

"Bonus points not required," Jared reminded in a soft whisper as Uber was about to leave.

But the madly grinning villain was not to be put off. "Hey, you started it when you gave this whole thing a Mission Impossible theme."

Well, that was true, Jared conceded just as Uber departed, leaving the remaining two with nothing to do but stare at each other for a while.

"Dude, this is going to be SO awesome!" Leet blurted, unable to contain his excitement.

Okay, not.

Cameras were following Uber, that was the riskiest part of this whole venture, but the villainous duo were not about to be put off from filming their latest venture. They had two flying remotes, trying to stay up, in shadows cast by the light fixtures and out of sight, but also one minor spy-cam concealed in the glasses Uber was wearing. Leet opened all of those camera views in different windows, which on the usual tiny laptop screen made for some pretty small displays - then the tinker leaned forward, so that he was about four inches away from the screen, incidentally blocking off Jared's view.

Jared rolled his eyes, but he did not have to watch to know what should be going on. The basic plan was very simple. Uber was to go around wearing the uniform of the janitorial company that did cleanup in here, and would go from office to office pushing the janitorial cart, carrying out the garbages.

Now one thing you almost have to work in the industry to know, is computer professionals acquire stacks of old parts and outdated junk very much like parks collect litter. It just kind of happened. And state-funded universities have that strange thing going on common to all government entities in that they can waste money in the most horrendous ways, while all of the while squeezing one or two visible areas and crying aloud how poorly funded they are.

Jared knew enough people who worked for school administrations or IT departments to know. And one of the ways they spent lavishly was on their servers. But when those went out of warranty in a couple of years, they'd buy more to replace them. To be fair, their insurance practically required it. They couldn't handle the liability if something vital should break and not be covered by the manufacturer.

Still, loads of perfectly good electronics got turned off and set aside when it ran out of warranty and they had to replace it. Sure, some got sold. But others piled up like snow drifts in the corners and on unused desks and in server rooms, sometimes cannibalized for spare parts, often not.

But in aggregate one college usually had an entire store's worth of very high end electronic and computer parts lying around, a trifle old, but mostly still functional. And where most of that accumulated was around the IT department, the guys who fixed those computers.

So Uber got himself in the uniform of their janitorial service and went shopping, pushing along the trolley collecting garbage from office to office, with Leet watching through the spy cams checking out those stacks of old peripherals and computer parts, having Uber grab whatever spare junk he wanted as those cameras picked them up. Uber would then stuff those electronic bits into clean white plastic bags and carry them out with the garbage.

It was simple, elegant, and low risk. They did not even have to steal the uniform, just go to the shop that sold them and buy one in Uber's sizes. And it hurt the university about as much as it hurt a four year old to have a haircut. There would be whining and complaining, but no actual ears cut off. Services would continue uninterrupted.

Only a handful of people on campus would even notice.

They'd timed their arrival for that hour between the close of the normal work day yet before the actual janitors showed up. So to anyone in the department working late Uber was just a janitor working early, if they even noticed. They'd never find the building completely empty, because computer techs had a lot in common with tinkers in general, in that some would invariably work unreasonable hours just plugging away at one project or another. But most of them stuck to their offices after hours and with Jared's plan they'd pass through more or less invisibly and be gone before the employees knew it.

Of course, being unabashed showboaters, Uber and Leet couldn't just leave it at that.

Jared had invoked Mission Impossible. And yes, there was a game for that, and of course they'd played it, and now he'd swiftly learned from close experience they *couldn't* leave that alone, so whole extra complications had gotten involved. One of those was they were all wearing rubber masks that Leet had invented a machine to print out; masks that, like the show, were almost magical in how effectively they disguised one person's features as another. Uber was wearing a mask that was vaguely oriental, and that might have come from that character what's-his-name from Mortal Kombat, the guy who was supposedly a movie star. Uber and Leet hadn't named him, just expecting that Jared should know.

Leet's mask was of a smaller, shorter oriental figure that Jared was even more lost on than the guy out of Mortal Kombat, while Jared's own mask was something of a prank on him by the two, as its features were those of Rei Ayanami.

The irony was not lost on him. From what Jared had figured out, all of those hours doing research in the library, whoever had created this series may as well have built it on the idea of, "Hey, what about if we do Evangelion, only using superpowers instead of giant robots!"

The grimdark and hopelessness was pretty much spot on.

He was going to assume the "everyone betrays pretty much everyone else" rule was also in effect, so he could be prepared and guard against it.

Still, faces disguised in a way impossible to casually detect was one Mission Impossible theme, but not enough to base a video on. Since Jared's plan would make for a lousy youtube clip, and these guys were perennial glory hounds, posting vids of all of their various crimes (which, Jared kept silent about how much good sense that lacked), they added on their own ideas for an impossible mission they could do here at the same time.

It was their goal that frankly blew Jared away.

The word this world used for super-scientists like Reed Richards and Iron Man, who built inventions straight out of science fiction, was Tinker, and everyone wanted them because they were almost alone in producing stuff that normal people could use to make a difference in cape fights. And so every gang, and every government snatched up tinkers as fast as they could find them.

Since tinkers had to maintain their super-devices, often could not figure out each other's tech, and only rarely could those items be duplicated, the world wasn't flooded with science fiction levels of technology. But that did not stop all sides of every conflict wanting all of the super devices they could get hold of.

Still, those items got broken, left behind in fights, captured along with the villain who was using them, or found in the workshops of dead heroes. What then? Well, the government claimed them. And what did the government do with them? Usually, they researched them just on the off chance they could learn something useful, or ideally duplicate them.

One or two items that normal scientists could figure out could be worth trillions in the right hands. So research budgets were lavish. And who did research for the government? Some got done by the military, of course, and some by corporations, but most of those 'look into this and see if you can find anything' projects, the low-security sort anyway, were handled by the nation's universities.

They always have been.

There was thirty years worth of broken or discarded tinker tech accumulated in government owned warehouses across the globe, and most of it never got looked at, passed over for more promising leads or higher priority projects.

Uber and Leet were going to massage the college's data network until they found out their sources of tinker-tech, the warehouses and such that their research projects got shipped in from. They were after their locations, and ideally the shipment and communication protocols so Uber and Leet could gain access for themselves.

If they could do it, they'd get their hands on billions of dollars worth of slightly broken tinker tech devices, most of which Leet could probably fix, at least temporarily. And quite a lot of those were top quality gear made with sophisticated electronics, using professional tools and lathed out of good materials, not the blend of garage sale, used car lot, and radio shack parts Leet commonly used. So even broken devices could serve as parts for much better inventions on his part. A truckload out of such a place, even just filling their pockets, could give Leet the fuel to pull them out of obscurity and really put them on the map.

~Of course,~ thought Jared. ~My plan would do that too.~

On the other hand, he had to admit that getting their hands on the location of even one such stockpile was a goal truly worthy of the Mission Impossible theme.

It was almost embarrassing how easily they did it, too. Seriously, Uber just walked into an office where the computer had been left on and logged in, almost a statistical certainty, really, and with that level of access was soon throughout their entire network.

Uber had some rather significant hacking skills. They were all but a necessity when on your own, acting as a villain team, because somebody had to research targets. And since Uber's super power *was* skills, it came naturally.

Perhaps when they cut out all of the boring frames and set it to music, it would be interesting or dramatic, but being there as it happened was a letdown.

Well, it was until Uber used that level of access to take control of an even higher level of administrator rights, and use those to set up several messages as if they came from the head of the college, authorizing the IT department to take the week of Christmas off instead of just the day, repealing several unpopular policies, offering to pay for the overtime the college had been borderline-stealing from its support personnel, repealing the latest tuition increase for students that had gone entirely into the salaries of high-administration personnel who were already paid too much for their minimal duties, and in all other ways doing things that would be so popular the guy would come off looking as a real schmuck if he tried to undo them.

And with that, they had fuel for a video.

Jared had recommended strenuously, several times, not to tell people about stealing access to the warehouse, or the other project they were running - because the moment they tell people about the warehouse access, the guys in charge of that program would do whatever they had to do to shut off that access, move the warehouse, whatever. And they'd be certain to make it harder to find next time as well. And the other thing, well, it was just good sense not to let anyone else know about that, as that knowledge getting out could be even worse than admitting to knowing about the warehouse thing.

But he'd been surprised to find that they'd listened.

So with the computer prank, they had their video. Something to release once the college president has enough egg on his face from undoing what were sure to be popular changes.

The next stage of the project was even easier, as Uber delivered a big black trash bag full of nothing but smaller white garbage bags, all clean, full of spare electronics he'd collected to the back of the panel truck he'd rented (under a false name and with forged papers, forgery being another one of those skills endlessly useful to a small villain team) at the same time as he brought out the real garbage for the dumpster.

Jared and Leet merely left the building and got in the panel truck so Leet could begin working while Uber went back for another load, checking the next floor of offices.

Leet unfolded one of the beds they'd gotten from a medical supply place, intended for the next stage of their plan, to use as a workbench, while Jared happily took a seat of the other side to behave as another pair of hands to hold things steady, or pass on tools as needed.

On the screen, Uber had given up asking whether his partner wanted this or that bit of spare electronics, as the first trip had more than adequately convinced him that his tinker friend wanted them all.

It gave Jared opportunity to make another couple of small requests, amendments to his plan, during the few moments of downtime.

For the most part, Leet merely shrugged and built what he wanted. Doing so did not take forever, though, as both things he'd wanted were fairly small, and done easily with the materials at hand. So, to make conversation, during one of the dull moments between deliveries of spare parts, Leet asked, "So, what do you do, anyway? What's your power?"

Jared lazily lofted a single eyebrow, as he returned calmly. "You're asking the wrong question. More important than what I can do, is what I can do for you. It doesn't matter if I pay my end of the deal with powers or not, so long as you get paid, right?"

The gaming tinker juggled a shrug from one shoulder to shoulder for a minute, accepting the truth of that. But it did not blunt his curiosity. "So what do you do?"

Luckily, Jared had prepared an answer for that, in case they'd asked. He leaned back against the inside wall of the panel truck. "You know that nobody gets to pick their power, right?"

"Until today," Leet laughed, as he waved to the completed projects for Jared's mission, just waiting for Uber to finish looting so they could go off and set them up in privacy and actually use them.

The redhead had to give him that. "Okay, until today. But if you ask anyone on Parahumans Online, they'll tell you it's commonly known that nobody gets to pick their power. Right?"

"Right."

Jared's face grew serious. "So, you won't judge me if I have a power that stinks?"

Leet's face lost most of his amusement, as he snorted. "Like I'd have room to talk."

Jared smiled. "No, I think your power is awesome. Now, imagine, if you will, a precog with the same limitation: it only has one use. So picture being someone who has only ever seen one glimpse of the future, and it is his own death."

His face was very sober as he finished that statement.

"Dude, that would suck!" the tinker blurted out, then caught his companion's expression, and spirits lifted in response as he taunted. "You know, now my own power doesn't feel so bad."

Uber came in the back doors of the truck, carrying the last load of spare electronics. Checking from face to face, he demanded, "What did I miss?"

Leet jerked a thumb toward the ten year old. "Kid's got the same power as the cyclops from Kull."

"Sees the future, but only sees his own death?" Uber asked to confirm, as he put down the last bag and slid through the waist-high piles towards the driver's seat.

"Yup." Leet agreed, grinning.

"Dude, that sucks." Uber started the motor and put the truck in gear. After pulling out of their parking space, he dared enough to ask, "What was it?"

Jared had done research on this as well, and one probable cause had stuck out to him more than any other. The biggest of the big bads currently known on this planet were called Endbringers, because they had a nasty habit of destroying whole cities, plus surrounding areas. And one of those specialized in coastal areas, of which Brockton Bay was.

"Leviathan."

Suddenly, Leet's gloating in the back of the van grew quiet.

"When?" Uber asked, teeth clenched as he drove, eyes locked on the road.

An answer for this Jared had not researched out beforehand, so he just winged it, picking something suitably dire. "I didn't look any older."

The atmosphere grew positively grim in the compartment.

"Let's get this stuff moved to the next location and set up, alright?" Leet proposed, all of the humor gone from his voice. "Suddenly the teleport power is looking real good."

Jared kept his own expressions well in check, He'd tried his best to avoid lying, just implying, but they'd pressed enough to break through that. He'd had no such visions, just a bad feeling when he'd first looked at a picture of Leviathan.

On the other hand, it was a great way to light a fire under the duo, to let them think their bacon was at stake too. After all, if Leviathan did come for Jared, it would not be leaving the rest of the city alone. So it was not a bad thing for them to feel a personal stake in wanting his project done now too.

Perhaps this way they'd be less inclined to spare time on sidetrips like youtube filming.

OoOoO

They did not have far to drive. Every college has rooms that don't see frequent use. Some go unvisited for months, some for years. Uber drove their panel truck to the college stadium where they all, wearing the appropriate uniforms, unloaded the inventions that Jared and Leet had freshly packed during the drive into clear, new boxes.

When Brockton Bay's economy collapsed sales of all sorts of things suffered, including sporting event tickets. So the college's once-generous sporting programs had been reduced, with many of the old rooms and offices closed and mothballed against the hopes of a brighter day when those programs could be restored. It was into one of those they moved their equipment, through the echoing halls of a mostly silent building.

Jared didn't even know to what sport these rooms had once been associated, as all of that special equipment had been packed away. He did help as Uber and Leet cooperated together to set up three sets of medical beds, along with the equipment for monitoring and keeping hydrated that many coma patients.

"We could have just set this up so we'd be pulled in bodily, like Tron," Uber complained as he got an IV drip ready.

Rolling some medical thingy into position, Jared disagreed. "From all of the research I've done on Leet's power, the closer something is to a device he's already invented, the higher the risk of failure. And you'd already had him build a teleporter for one of your past capers. So moving our bodies anywhere is out, unless we want this whole rig to fail on us."

Leet groused something quietly under his breath, but did not contradict that statement.

They quickly filled the room with mountains of computer parts, rebuilt using Leet's talent into a server farm of quite prodigious proportions, all of that surrounding three medical stations, which themselves all lay facing a large, antique, cabinet style, stand alone, arcade game - because Leet hadn't been able to resist using that as a case to hold the freakish nightmare of electronics inside.

Jared had seen the innards while the tinker had been assembling it, and looking at it brought to mind what might happen if a game console had been trying to mate with a PC, and been covered in little LED ants before being abducted by aliens.

There was probably some game reference he wasn't getting.

Final checks completed, each of the three boys climbed into their own medical bed, with Uber going last so he could hook everyone up to the IV drips and so on, him being the one with all of the medical skill, and so on.

"Safeties in place to bring us out if something goes wonky?" Jared asked to distract himself as the needles went into his arm and other places.

"Yeah. What's this?" Uber confirmed before asking about a set of equipment unique to Jared's setup, a repurposed football helmet that now looked like it more properly belonged in a mad scientist's laboratory, and linked through wires to another bank of electronic equipment.

"Leet made it for me. I'll tell you about it inside."

With a glance over to his teammate to confirm, Uber gave a grudging nod then completed the setup, before going off to his own fold out bed to get wired in.

Leet, who had been watching, anxiously waited for his friend to get himself set, received a thumbs up and hit a button on the remote control he'd been caressing before anyone had a chance to say anything.

The world went white.

OoOoO

"Oh *thank* you," the soft, feminine voice dripped sarcasm.

Uber and Leet both collapsed, laughing, onto the featureless white floor of the non-room they were all occupying.

Those two looked exactly like their real world bodies did, which is what Jared had recommended for all of them. But apparently the value of slipping in a prank on him was too much for either villain to resist, because he was currently a she.

Frankly, it was annoying more than anything. He much preferred his true gender. But the boy turned girl blew out a sigh, resigning himself to the discomfort for a while - before he realized that he'd just exactly followed the motions set down for the female game sprite's "shrug and sigh" motion used to simulate boredom when the avatar has not received any input for a while.

His fresh outrage set off the two prankster villains into fresh gales of laughter.

"Relax," Leet pulled himself to his feet at last, wiping tears of merriment from his face. "You made me set this whole thing up based on astral projection, so our spirits get pulled in here and nothing we do in here can physically affect our bodies."

"Because we needed a training world, and our bodies could not be moved without risk of failure, because you'd already built a teleport thingy," Jared agreed, resigned to living out their joke for the duration.

"So nothing in here should do anything to our real bodies out there," Leet concluded with confidence. "Just like you asked, the only thing we should take out with us is our training."

The corner of Jared's currently female lips curled in minor scorn as he asked, "And how many times have you inventions worked exactly as you'd wanted?"

The suddenly abashed tinker looked chagrined.

Jared sighed again, then hid his annoyance as the game sprite body followed programmed motions perfectly for the in-game animation for that.

Uber was now up and examining the walls. "I don't believe in spirits, but here we are. So our minds got pulled in, if nothing else."

They were at the point he'd suggested for entry, a quick rendering of the most basic empty space possible, just serving as a point at which to pick races. Not that that mattered all that much, as Leet had stripped out all restrictions on which races could be what classes.

Now that he thought about it, Jared had never even considered asking for a gender selector module, so he'd be living with this prank for a while. Anger and irritation over that got shoved aside as worthless in the present circumstances.

Uber and Leet raced each other to select Undead as their race, both vanishing as they touched the icon. Rolling his eyes, Jared went to touch the one that would leave him human as had always been his intention. No, the game wasn't *supposed* to do anything to their physical bodies left behind out in the real world. But that did not mean that he was going to forgo other safeguards, as being generally cautious with the unknown was a good habit to be in.

Touching the icon that was supposed to leave him human, Jared vanished in a flash of light to appear in another indeterminate room with a double line of class shields along one wall, right next to Uber and Leet, whose stood there as undead with flesh rotting off their bones. Looking down, the redhead perceived that he was now a blood elf, and course still female.

"Any more surprises?" he asked dryly, as the two set off laughing.

Jared just calmly took the irritation and fed it to the fires within, burning away that emotion while keeping himself firmly in the void of calm. It just wasn't worth getting upset over, and so long as he kept reminding himself of that, it was true.

Didn't stop the other two geeks from rolling around on the floor helpless in gales of laughter. But it did help him control the urge to want to kick them.

With his high-heeled shoes.

Sigh.

Putting that from his mind for now as the best way to disarm the embarrassment they were trying to cause him, Jared stalked over to a large scroll, noting that at least that part of his plan had not been changed by the duo of prankster spirits.

Activating the scroll brought up a progress bar that passed by in a couple of seconds, ending up with the scroll vanishing and a burst of light across his current form as he learned a new ability.

The whole point and purpose of asking Leet to invent something was to train anyone who used it to gain extra powers and abilities.

It was a "I learn it in here, I carry it back to the real world" invention. And for a test run, they'd chosen to use World of Warcraft, running on a private server so they could set most of the rules however they wanted them.

And it was personalized to the extreme by the duo of gaming geniuses.

"So what was that scroll for?" Uber asked, rolling to a sitting position, wiping tears of laughter from his eyes. "Leet wouldn't tell me, and I couldn't pick it up."

With a totally unnecessary snap of his fingers, Jared created a duplicate of himself standing right next to his original self. It would have merited a great deal more smug of a look, but both bodies were still drop-dead-gorgeous female blood elves.

Still, it was with a satisfied grin that he told the supervillain, "You know how lots of the game content is unreachable unless you've got a bunch of other players helping you out? A while back I read an article about a man who paid for five copies of the game and ran them on five separate computers, logged all in at once, but had enough scripts and macros that he could run five man parties by himself, and he did quite well. Later, I heard of guys running even larger groups. That scroll just let me learn the Self-Duplication ability. That Frankenstein football helmet you saw me wearing outside? That's hardware Leet designed to make this possible for me, tied to a whole bunch of computers running even more virtual machines so I can have multiple copies of me run at the same time. So now hopefully I'll gain all of the abilities gained by any one of my copies, not just those of one class."

"It's no big deal," Leet assured his partner, climbing to his feet. "I figure we'll run through the game a couple of times, picking up all of the classes we want. It's close enough to the same thing."

The tinker went and stood before the panel of class emblems presented. "Plus, in return he agreed to run one of his characters under a moderator account, acting as support. So we've got a mod in our pocket. That way we can have bank tellers or venders and stuff teleported to us right out in the field, sparing us from having to do town runs. He promised to make all sorts of rare and restricted stuff available. It's great. So what class should we be?"

But game geeks currently wearing undead game bodies looked at each other, shouted, "Thieves!" in unison, slapped the emblem for the Rogue class, and vanished.

Jared facepalmed, before making bunches of more copies. Once assured that the copies could make copies, and his brain was somehow handling the sensory input from each one, they started touching class icons.

He had a game journal filled with a bunch of guides, like how to reach max level in four days, as well as guides for training in each skill or profession. They'd set up their bodies outside with medical support, so they wouldn't dehydrate or anything if they took a week in here. Plus, Leet had worked in some alarms to dump them out of the game if their bodies had any kind of emergency.

They had every kind of safety and safeguard he could suggest. The game was tweaked to remove all of the major nerfs put in by the company, he might as well enjoy himself. And while grinding he could spend the time plotting out how to get the duo back for their prank.

Plus, they were right. It would be absolutely awesome to learn how to teleport.

He warped in to find himself, not in the blood elf starting area, but in one of the major towns. He blinked, then pondered aloud, "Why are all of the game's Christmas decorations up?"

"Duh, because it's Christmas next week." Leet answered from where he'd been hiding behind the big, heavily decorated tree. "Now come over here and open some presents. We've tweaked it so you get all the drops, including special prizes for all of the years."

Uber was looking at their blood elf funny. "Aren't you school age? How could you not know that today was the last day before Christmas vacation?"

Instead of answering, Jared went over to the tree and opened his first present, finding within a big, red button. "What's this?"

Both Uber and Leet looked awkward, as well as slightly embarrassed. Leet answered. "It's a kill button for your powers."

"Yeah," Uber agreed, scratching the back of his neck awkwardly. "We figured it can't be that cool, staring at your own death. We don't know often you see it, but if, you know, you'd like it to stop showing you that... stuff."

A moment later he awkwardly complete the thought. "Leet made it, so it should work."

One does not refuse acts of kindness nor generosity, even when those are misplaced (and especially not when they are misplaced only because you have been lying). Jared happily pushed the button, then shuddered lightly, and used his acting skill to adopt a pleased, even euphoric expression.

"Wow! Thanks!" He smiled brightly to both of the other guys.

Two more boxes got shoved toward the avatar of a female blood elf. Opening them revealed two buttons, one labeled Uber, the other Leet. Jared's curious gaze got lifted to his two proto-friends.

"Taking away someone's powers is a lame move," Leet proclaimed, still not looking at him. "Not cool at all, even if the power sucks. So... we figured we'd offer you a replacement. I programmed those to give a copy of one of ours."

Jared blinked at the both for a moment. "Can't I have both?"

He was suddenly being stared at in shock by both parties. So he reiterated. "So what happens if I touch both buttons? Like at the same time?"

Uber's sudden stare got directed at Leet, who was struggling to think through the concept behind the question, and how it would work for his invention. Suddenly the tinker was on his feet, throwing down the present he'd been opening. "You'd get both powers! That's not fair!" The scrawny teen crossed his arms and sulked.

Jared smiled and cocked his head at the frustrated inventor. "Why couldn't you do the same?"

Leet waved a hand dismissively and angrily shook his head, slumping down to the ground. "Nah, I made it to replace a lost power. It won't work if you've got some already."

Jared gestured to the button now lying at his feet. "I happen to have a power-kill switch here. Would anyone else like to use it?"

Moments later, in vast multidimensional space, two shards screamed and died, all of their information lost.

OoOoO

Taylor was amazed to be sitting bundled up in a blanket in the Dallon household, having people actually listen for once as she told them how she came by each of the bumps, scrapes, scars and bruises from over a year-long campaign of bullying by her former best friend and her new cronies.

But, with Panacea describing the damage in detail, the stories of how each mark came about simply came out, and her mother Brandish, the famous cape whose day job was to be the Bay's best known lawyer, marking down her description of each offense, it was as though poison was finally draining out of her wounds, just to be able to tell people and be believed!

OoOoO

Author's Notes:

Total CYOA advantage points used to my benefit so far: Zero.

Total disadvantages? Most of them.

Could I continue in this vein? Certainly. It would be no problem at all to go right on through to the end, fixing the whole world one step at a time without any advantages beyond those I can gain in the story. Will I? Possibly. It really depends on which option would be more fun for me.


	3. Chapter 3

Stepping on Worm  
Chapter Three

by Skysaber  
aka Perfect Lionheart

OoOoO

No, I really couldn't recommend reading the Worm serial to anyone, unless you'd always been curious what the cutting subculture was like but were never depressed enough to try.

OoOoO

If someone were to inform one of the natives of the Worm universe about the true source of their superpowers, it would be dismissed out of hand as too ridiculous to be believed.

But the truth was a couple of giant, mutant, alien, multidimensional space whales flew up and shed bits of themselves, like alien space whale dandruff, over the planet, and getting a bit of alien space whale dandruff on you conveyed the ability to develop super powers.

Ridiculous, but it was the truth. Try to tell any native and they'd think you were nuts, though.

Now the whales did this because they had more powers than they knew what to do with, and rather than figure out all of the nuances themselves they just approached a sentient species like mankind to see what new uses those primitives could think up for those powers; ideally coming up with sufficiently new ways of using them that those new uses could be spun off and treated as whole new powers.

So they were basically just tricking other races into doing their research for them. And in return for this service, when the whales were done, they'd collect and reattach all of their dandruff, gathering together all of that wonderful new data, then they'd wipe out that sentient species across all dimensions they had access to.

Nice guys, huh?

But while they might seem to have tremendous numbers of powers, most drew back to what was a central aspect of the space whale's existence: an absolutely phenomenal ability to manipulate dimensional mass and energy, as well as shunt the consequences thereof elsewhere, to dimensions they did not care about.

Yes, this was the giant, mutant, alien, multidimensional space whale equivalent of dumping the toxic waste from all of your factories in the river, as it really screwed over those dump dimensions, but just try and stop them.

So, regardless of what the people who gained those powers thought, if the space whale dandruff granted you ability to throw fireballs that was actually just drawing heat and flame energy in from another dimension. Cold powers would involve shunting heat energy away. Flight would most likely involve the very intricate and precise ability to selectively shunt the effects of gravity on you elsewhere, across dimensions, so your gravity was actually affecting something else, thousands of dimensions away, while you flew.

The powers that did not call back to the alien space whale's dimensional shunting ability all relied upon a support function, which was the ability to perform the absolutely frightening amount of calculations necessary for the dimensional shunting to succeed. So while they might seem to grant various forms of the power of precognition, the ability to sense the future, all they were truly doing was running mathematical predictions based on known evidence, just like plain old ordinary stock market analysis software, taken to a higher level. The science powers were also just running a tremendous number of calculations based on known scientific principals. And having encountered a number of races, the alien space whales had run into scientific principles the human race had never heard of.

That was actually one of the space whales' greatest weaknesses. All of their abilities grew around a core of pseudo- or even super-science. And they fell into the trap of when your only tool is a hammer, every problem you see is a nail. Granted their little corner of the multiverse was very much on the shallow end for mystical energies, but they rejected out of hand any and all evidence of supernatural. The space whales were incurable skeptics who did not believe in souls, magic, gods, heaven, hell, or anything not strictly materialistic. A big part of that was they fell into the same trap common to stage magicians and charlatans the world over, in that by teaching ignorant yokels to think they were flying while hiding the invisible wires that did the actual work, they'd long since grown such cynicism as to reflexively, one might even say subconsciously, reject all evidence they did receive of actual supernatural occurrences as coincidences, or a trick, possibly by something else out there faking stuff just like they did, but according to principals they did not yet understand.

And when the space whales' dandruff stuck to people, it tended to convey that lack of belief in the supernatural to their hosts. Since quite a few forms of the supernatural required belief to function, that attitude made real evidence even scarcer on the ground.

Now it must be said all powers granted by the space whale dandruff were sharply limited, controlling only an infinitesimal fraction of the giant, mutant, alien space whales' overall power, as well as containing safeguards put in place to protect the space whales themselves. They weren't out to endanger themselves doing these experiments.

It was also important to note those abilities were only borrowed, as it was that bit of space whale dandruff that was doing all of the dimensional shunting and manipulating, handling all of the precise and intricate calculations. So the person was just the driver, pointing his power at something with intent to act, while the tiny bit of space whale handled the rest.

Now observers to the universe had taken to calling the giant, mutant, alien, multidimensional space whales 'entities' (mostly because that was shorter and easier to say than giant, mutant, alien, multidimensional space whales) and their dandruff 'shards' (because who wants to think about getting giant, mutant, alien, multidimensional space whale dandruff shed all over yourself? That's nasty!).

These dandruff shards were all semi-autonomous, and given the drive to encourage the use and development of the power they represented as much as possible. So they influenced their hosts strongly to seek conflict, as one of the most reliable methods for producing the desperation that frequently resulted in ever more creative uses of those powers.

Necessity was the mother of invention, after all. Even for space whales.

Now Leet was cautious, he played it safe, and consequently the shard empowering him hated him and wanted him dead so it could move over to someone who might be more daring, and with a stronger possibility of those surges of insight that come with leaping in and out of the jaws of death a few times.

Amusingly enough, to put it in gamer terms, it wanted to level up, but he was denying it the xp it needed. And since human life really didn't matter either to giant, mutant, alien space whales or their dandruff, the shard was perfectly willing to kill Leet so that it could move on.

Somehow sensing that his own power seemed out to get him, Leet understandably became even more cautious, taking even fewer risks, and consequently driving his shard to maddened frustration, wanting to kill him even more.

Theirs was not a happy relationship.

And so things probably would have continued to be very awkward between them, until one day when Leet met a very special ten year old. Now suddenly Leet was asking his power to help him build something that his shard knew very well was impossible. In it's blindness, it was certain there was no such thing as souls, so the ability to move them somewhere was both pointless and impossible.

But in that request, Leet's shard sensed an opportunity. Because what Leet wanted to do sounded to it very much like the equivalent to launching a one-way mission to Mars, if there was no such place as Mars to arrive at.

In other words, it sounded very much like a perfect opportunity to kill its host off!

In its hubris, the shard, like the space whale that spawned it, actually thought it understood the multiverse. HAH! The race couldn't even do true telepathy. There were things out there that, if they encountered them, would blow those whales tiny little, uncreative minds - if they didn't eat them first.

Seriously, if one of these 'entities' wandered too close to a Mind Flayer Elder Brain that brain could not only take it out, it could take it over and make the whale its sock puppet. The alien space whales were actually lucky to be stuck in their tiny little (and mostly uninhabited) corner of the multiverse. It saved them from encountering some of the real threats out there.

The alien space whales were quite lucky only a tiny cluster of the multiverse fell under their influence. But they were like fish that never understood there was a world above the surface of the water. Actually, no, it was worse than that. Their fiefdom was so tiny it was more like they were goldfish who had a mental block against imagining anything might exist outside of their bowl.

But if you have access to All. These. Things! It was a very easy trap to fall into to think those were all of the things there were out there.

And like most big fish in a small bowl, they considered themselves the ultimate pinnacle of existence. But like countless races before them, they were about to learn that treating mankind as a disposable resource to be used up at their whim was a bad idea.

Invading Earth is a pretty dumb move for any alien.

But the space whales were more than arrogant enough to give it a try. Now part of that pride was that the space whales had been giving out powers to lesser races for so long, and been the only source of superpowers to those races they'd visited, they had started to consider themselves the only possible source of superpowers.

And they were wrong.

Leet's shard very happily built him a metaphorical bridge to a place that it was certain could not exist. It set all things in order to create a pocket world to mirror what it felt was vacuum, in a dimensional sense, a blank wall that never had been investigated, not concerned in the least that what it was sure would fail would actually work if the concepts Leet was asking it to design along actually existed. The space whale dandruff even let its host play around with that pocket dimension's rules, as if that actually mattered.

Leet's shard was satisfied that it built him the equivalent of half of a spaceship, the whole hull open to vacuum the way a dollhouse is open to the child playing in it. So what if the shard let its human play around with the furniture inside for a bit? It would finally see the end of that loser at last!

And, naturally, it was then the tinker finally started doing things that were interesting.

First he wanted it to help him in designing a kill button for powers. Now, to the shard's point of view, 'shard' and 'power' were the exact same thing. So a "Kill powers" request read to it as a "Kill shard" command instead.

And that was less inappropriate than it seemed, as there was a use for weapons that giant, mutant, alien, multidimensional space whales could use to fight other giant, mutant, alien, multidimensional space whales. Sometimes your space whales just can't get along. There was even status attached to such projects. And since shards were quite literally pieces of those whales, the ability to destroy a piece could lead in the future to some ability to damage the whole, so this project could turn into something interesting and useful to its progenitor - exactly the kind of discovery that piece of whale dandruff was tasked to seek.

The limit Leet was placing on the device, that a person could only use the button to destroy their own shard/power, and having total access to Leet's brain it knew well that he had never even imagined using it himself, the shard happily complied and built the weapon.

Then Leet wanted something that, from the shard's perspective anyway, was a way to back up the information in a shard, something like the budding process whereby a shard with enough information stored could create a new, slightly different, version of the power that it represented. Only it wasn't a bud, but more an alternate to that procedure, with just the information and a playback/implant feature.

Who knew? Perhaps such a thing could be used to help repair a damaged shard.

Whatever it was it was interesting, and could lead in new directions that the space whales had not yet thought of, which was exactly the kind of innovation they were after because you never knew when those things could turn out useful.

So it built that too, allowing Leet to charge up a pair of those devices, backing up both itself and Uber's shard.

It couldn't see anything wrong with that, and happily made note of the information as it made progress on its research goal towards interesting new uses of itself, getting ready to report after the separation when Leet died in his hopelessly foolish experiment.

Then the humans triggered what the shard was convinced was their suicide device, the one to grab something that does not exist (the soul) and put it someplace that could not be real (a dimension of magic), all built with a little extra boost on the part of Leet's shard as it seriously wanted nothing better than to kill off its host.

Interestingly, the trio of humans merely went comatose.

Now this caught the attention of both of the shards involved. That project should have failed. A catastrophic, lethal failure at that. Just like the metaphor of building a bridge to someplace that doesn't exist, that bridge should have collapsed the moment it was used, because as far as the shard could see it was only anchored properly on one end, so should have barely held up under its own weight even before something tried to cross it.

But something was going on that neither shard understood, because...

Then both shards died in agony, losing all of their information.

OoOoO

Tian in China sat up and took notice, interrupting a droning general and glancing off at a seemingly random angle that only he knew was in the direction of a pair shards in nonlinear space, before returning to his stoic, almost unresponsive image.

Two of his shards had died.

That shouldn't have been possible.

Tian, like his companion and partner Winter, were the human seeming avatars of two giant, mutant, alien, multidimensional space whales. As such, they had so many different forms of sensory abilities and precognition that they earnestly felt they were omniscient (they weren't, if they were then they would not need other races to do their research for them, as they would already know all of that stuff). To have something occur that he hadn't predicted beforehand was quite honestly an unwelcome shock.

That had never happened before.

However, the problem with all forms of mathematical or scientific prediction, is they are all based upon analysis of previously known information. They can't account for anything they don't know about. That's not the way science works. It doesn't matter how advanced your math is or how precise your calculations, you cannot account for a variable that never before existed.

And having people appear out of thin air from beyond all known dimensions, without either space whale or their minions having done it, was completely unprecedented.

It had first been said in regards to weather, describing how difficult it was to predict, that if you could map out every current, every jetstream, account for every mountain, plain and hill, everything that affects air movement down to and including every single leaf on every tree, in fact all of the plants and every animal until you'd accounted for everything, mapping out with complete accuracy all of their interactions throughout the entire system, but had left out a single yellow butterfly flapping its wings in the jungles of South America, pretty soon those tiny puffs of air disturbed by the butterfly would start to affect small and local things, throwing off your predictions slightly but probably in ways too inconsequential to be noticed at first; but that over time even so small an unaccounted for variable would gradually introduce larger and larger variables in the system of things interacting with them, each step of change affecting more and more other things, introducing increasingly less minor errors in your ability to predict, until it all snowballed to where you could predict nothing with any accuracy.

That often gets summarized down to "the butterfly effect", but it got summarized so often that a shocking number of people had never heard the full version. They only knew those words "the butterfly effect", and that it had something to do with chaos theory.

And being a space whale did not render you immune to chaos theory.

They could not even start to predict the results from an unknown until they had first quantified what that previously unknown variable was, and how it worked. No matter how advanced the math was, it needed data to analyze before it could start giving out predictions.

At this point, all Tian knew was that two of his shards had died. But that shouldn't have been possible. Shards didn't die. As much as they encouraged death and dismemberment in others, steps were taken to insure the shards themselves were as protected as possible. So in normal operation their destruction was all but impossible. Endbringers could not even put them at risk.

He knew the problem couldn't be on this planet, or any of the close dimensional analogs, because they had scanned them each thoroughly before arrival, making comprehensive models to serve as the basis of all of their predictive powers since. And nothing on them existed that was capable of killing off shards. About the only thing that could destroy shards was when space whale fought space whale.

About the only thing that should be capable of FINDING them was another space whale!

So Tian sent a message [DANGER] to his partner Winter, and they both directed their full attention to scanning the multidimensional space around them for signs of another space whale that might be sneaking up on them.

Thus, they actually became LESS perceptive to things going on on the planet.

OoOoO

Jared woke up to all of the usual complaints of having been asleep for something like four days, minus some because of the childlike ability to bounce back from things like that so often exhibited by ten year olds.

The first thing he did on waking up was stretch, and groan over muscles unused for so long getting into motion again, then pull off the fried remains of a shorted out football helmet and look down.

"Oh, I am going to *kill* Uber and Leet," he declared, halfway serious, seeing as he was now wearing the fully mature body of a female blood elf.

"Pranks are one thing, taking away a guy's balls just goes completely beyond the pall," he grumbled, rising to his feet to find the clothes he had been wearing as a ten year old were, surprise surprise, totally inadequate to his new form. Not to mention heavily constricted in the chest area.

But, if there was anything he was familiar with, it was the rule: Magic Makes Things Possible.

Being on a heavily magical demiplane specifically designed to grant visitors powers did not limit the changes any, either, as the world that pocket plane mirrored off of had almost self destructed several times due to having too *much* magic. And get enough magic in one place, and things tend to happen all on their own. Give that even the slightest hint of direction and, well, things can get extreme pretty quickly.

Although Jared was not, at the moment, aware of the specific inner workings of the 'training world' he'd asked Leet to set up.

No, there was a reason he had been so cautious when they were going to a magic-heavy world to train in magic, even in simulation. Because even when magic was not an intelligent force itself, a surprising number of those forces connected to it had wicked senses of humor, and all too often would leap on opportunities to make things real if someone found that awkward or embarrassing.

Fairies were not alone in being magical pranksters. Even death gods were not above pulling jokes on their clients.

So you just don't tempt them into humor if at all possible, that's all. Because most of them got their chuckles out of annoying people to the point of gibbering madness.

Knowing what was bound to happen if he should go around naked in a girl's body for even a moment (the act of someone waking or walking in on him would be demanded by the rules of nature) and his own former attire being totally unsuited for him to use now, Jared reached out of bed for one of the spare hospital sheets they were not currently using and activated some magic.

Instantly the sheet flew up, froze fully open in mid-air, and with the suddenness of glass breaking it was chopped up into a clothing pattern as quickly as that. Then pieces flew about, assembling themselves together into a dress, where the seems suddenly sealed together and, seconds after the whole process started, a new simple gown was laying across the blood elf's knees, where she reached out and drew it on under the covers, shucking her former attire busily as part of the same process.

~Hopefully, I won't need this for more than an hour or so of waking time before I get back to my true gender,~ the redhead consoled what was currently herself.

As a minor proof to magic lending itself more readily to pranks than anything else, gender flipping was absurdly easy to do with magic. Half a dozen worlds each offered different ways, using different mechanisms, mostly in the form of annoying curses. One of those should be cheap and easily found. The options were almost too numerous to list, really.

But he'd have to get to one of those worlds first, and while warcraft mages were perfectly capable of teleporting between worlds, they had to have visited their target point first.

Other wizards were not so limited.

Jared slipped the dress on and, thus garbed, got out of her hospital bed and checked on the other two. As the low man on the totem pole, the one with the "new guy" label, when the timer ticked down to do a routine checkup on their bodies, he'd gotten stuck with the job.

It didn't bother him.

Well, it wouldn't but the floor was cold, naturally, it being the middle of winter and the college not trying to heat the entire stadium. They'd gotten the thermostat for this room running so they wouldn't freeze. Actually, the temperature was set a little high to compensate for their bodies being dormant and so not generating as much heat, but somehow warm air did not stop the floor from feeling icy on his poor feet.

No, her poor feet. And that right there was probably the problem, as it was often the case that women would freeze at temperatures men felt comfortable, and men were sweating and sweltering in temps that women enjoyed.

Just another one of those little adjustments, like peeing sitting down and all. Actually, the worst bit about switching genders wasn't the sudden change in plumbing, though that was adjustment enough. No, it was the brain chemistry. Girls thought processes simply worked different than mens'. How they arrived at their conclusions, weights they gave to different evidences and the steps they took to get there were very much like a different language, like analog vs digital, or suddenly going from riding a bike to kayaking down river rapids, that's all.

And it had a nasty habit of tripping you up, if you expected "A" and got "blue", for instance.

Hmm, perhaps the best comparison was that it was as if someone had switched out what instrument you played, right under your fingertips, while you were performing in the middle of an orchestra. There came first the shock, then disorientation, then finally at last you'd settle down and play your best, only to discover you were not as expert on the unfamiliar instrument, what with the different keying, and so on.

It didn't matter how much you admired the saxophone, if you'd never played on one you would not be as good on it as your preferred instrument, that's all. So thinking through a foreign mental setup was a handicap, and something to be resolved as soon as possible.

To say nothing of it being as annoying as all get out.

Everything checked out okay on the other boys. Jared changed out drip bags, checked vitals and other such sundries. The checkup on everyone and renewing the fluid reservoirs took no more than a few minutes, then he was ready to log back into the game.

Only it didn't work.

That wasn't right. But trying again and then again did not change the result (with computers this is not insane, as it would be with something else). Checking over the system revealed nothing wrong, no faults or errors. Perhaps the thing just could not pull in someone once it was already functioning?

Stranger things had happened with computers. Things were so complex quirks like that could basically be assumed, especially on a first activation before any refinement had a chance to iron them out.

Well, there were plenty of computer parts nearby. He had a copy of Leet's power, and they had sackfuls and sackfuls of spare parts. No reason he could not just make another.

There Jared stopped himself.

He did not strictly need to go back in, as it was a training simulation, and with the admittedly unfair advantages they'd given themselves over what the game expected users to have, they'd blown clear through all of the way to max levels in under a day. It helped a little that, inside of the game at least, they did not need to sleep or take potty breaks, and eating or drinking was strictly voluntary.

Jared had gone on to learn all he could, mastering the rest of the game's trainable content not long after. Uber's power made learning skills absurdly easy. Any opportunity they had where they might go up, they went up.

Doing so, the redhead discovered he had a very different play style than Uber and Leet. He had a quirk, in that he was what some called a complete-ist. He liked all of the boxes checked, meaning to get every skill he could and max them out, and gain all of the recipes, even the useless ones. If he was collecting pets, he wanted ALL of the pets (except for the yucky ones - he made an exception for snakes and cockroaches), same with mounts, or anything else. If he started collecting something, he wanted to complete that collection.

Of course, having a moderator account made that trivially easy when he could just type a bit and cause any item in the game to appear. It didn't even matter if those were restricted by race or faction, as Leet had stripped out all of those limits too.

This extended to the obscure spells, even if it was only the graphic that was different over the common version. He wanted it. It wasn't an uncontrollable urge, it just appealed to his sense of tidiness.

Uber and Leet's playstyle, on the other hand, was anything but tidy. Brutal and effective, yes, fast and overwhelming, all true. But not tidy. Anything they missed on the first time, they just naturally assumed they'd get to on one of the many following play-throughs.

He did find it somewhat annoying that their playstyle routinely crushed his, however.

He knew this because they'd been crushing him, repeatedly. It turns out that question about what side he preferred for Command and Conquer Generals had not been rhetorical in the slightest. Leet had added to the list of recipes for the engineering skill bulldozers for all of the major factions of that game that used them, which had the ability to build the entire tech tree, and they'd been using some of the wide open spaces and deserts of the warcraft world to build empires and wage wars on each other.

Jared lost, every time.

But dying early had also given him extra time in between battles to pursue some of his own special projects with the help of his mod account, so he couldn't say he was upset about that.

At the end of a battle they'd sell off all of the remaining buildings and start again. Nor was that the only game they'd played. An engineering pattern for a Terran SCV gave them the ability to construct human empires out of Starcraft, which they'd then waged war against using converted hordes of orcs and trolls, stolen out of the warcraft cities using mind control devices from the Syndicate game.

There were teleport portals that led to areas that functioned like the Diablo 1 & 2 games, and all kinds of crazy stuff in there.

Engineering patterns for droids out of Star Wars Battlegrounds had those deserts criss crossed by speeders firing blasters at each other, and the icy northern lair of the lich king had been converted over into a reenactment of the Battle of Hoth.

Some things Leet had programmed in worked, most notably the droids and engineering vehicles, then some things didn't, like his peasant costumes had failed to convey the ability to construct any buildings or grant access to new tech trees, so his attempt at recreating the various Age of Empires games in first person didn't pan out, and the less said about his attempt to make Zerg the better.

That's okay, Jared didn't like Undercity anyway.

Jared couldn't say he was unhappy about that, but it did prove the theme: that Leet had an affinity for engineering devices, even when he was only programming them into a game, as it was the technical stuff that often worked, while the non-technological failed.

Having long since gained the levels and engineering skill they were after from warcraft, now the gamer duo were just enjoying their version of paradise. When he'd left they'd been playing a weird amalgamation of Dungeon Keeper and Overlord in the ruins of Stormwind, using hybrid dungeon hearts/castle orbs they'd had him make for them using his alchemy and enchanting skills.

But was there really any reason to rejoin them?

Jared didn't think so.

As much crazy fun as they were having, their real bodies were still stuck here on a very deadly world, and survival came first on the priority list.

So the elf picked up some of those lovely spare electronic parts and began to tinker.

One of the first things Jared had pointed out in the mission folder that he had set up to entice them to build a world of warcraft server they could jump into was the tremendous utility of the engineering skill - especially to someone like Leet, as anything a warcraft engineer could get a pattern for, he could make as many copies as he liked of.

This concept had set that tinker on fire with enthusiasm.

One of the first things Jared had recommended was that whoever modified the program could create patterns for all sorts of tools that would useful or worthwhile out in the real world. Not just hand tools or power tools, but freestanding machines that required floor space like hydraulic presses and lathes, injection molding and so on. And that with the engineering skill and those patterns, Leet would never have to fear being without a workshop or tool again.

It sucked being only able to make things once when you've lost the tools you'd made and were left without ability to make more.

Predictably, in light of that Leet had instantly taken entire catalogs he had once helplessly drooled over, printed by companies that outfitted labs and workshops, and enthusiastically programmed those products in as patterns, so that all he'd need was an inflow of metal and he could have all the workshop equipment that he'd ever dreamed of.

Nor was that the end of what he'd programmed. There was now, in one of those ruined warcraft towns, an old fashioned jukebox entitled "Leet's Greatest Hits" that if you found and put money in, taught patterns for every invention Leet had ever made, plus some, both in the form of components as well as completed devices.

The frustrated tinker had been elated over finding a way around his "one shot only" limitation at last, and may have gone just a little bit overboard.

But if so, it was perfectly understandable. In his place, who wouldn't?

The project Jared was tinkering on came to a halt as he ran into his lack of certain necessary parts. Although certain Leet's invention to jump one's spirit into a video game to train did not *require* a stand-up, cabinet style arcade game, and that he'd included that just for flavor, it was part of the engineering pattern he'd taught, and so Jared was stuck with either getting one of those cabinet games (and a playstation 3) or burning out one of his tinker slots to reinvent the device to go without one.

Obviously, burning out tinker slots being somewhat permanent, suffering a little irritation now to avoid doing that was the better choice.

Setting down a teleport marker so she could return here quickly and easily (and better yet, not be traced on her way back), the next problem was what to wear, as a simple gown made out of a single bedsheet was in no way winter clothing. The dress also did not come with any shoes, although that would have been simplicity itself to fix, as she'd maxed out all of the skills in the game, including tailoring and leatherworking. All she needed was some material, so she switched on what was normally the dwarven racial trait of Treasure Finding.

Let's see, bunches of towels that could be remade into bags. That's nice, as it would let her carry stuff. One of the things Uber and Leet had fixed with their game mods was to make bag space nearly infinite. It wasn't really infinite, you could fill it up, but you'd have to be a serious pack rat to even try, and even so you'd not run out of room soon. So having any of those style of bags would be good.

There were some sheets, oh, and back in a storeroom packed with garbage there were some broken leather office chairs, those could be stripped for leather, and...

The redhaired blood elf trotted off as soon as her mystic treasure senses made the discovery of a bunch of disused Christmas stuff all packed into the back of a closet in an old office that was being used as a storeroom. There was quite a lot there, and all relatively new and in good condition. They must have forgotten it was even there, or else they would have hauled it out for the season.

Minutes later, the blood elf was in a cute little Santa's Helper outfit, one of the children safe ones instead of the risque versions packed away in a different box. No, this one was good enough to go out in public and be seen in. It was warm, the skirt was a decent length (long enough no one would mind their daughter wearing it), and if you looked closely you realized that it had leggings underneath so it was a more or less a floor length ensemble, and more important for a female body, it was warm!

Yes, as easily as a female body could freeze, it was worth mentioning twice.

Finding an old phone book told her where she had to go in order to find the parts she'd need. Next she summoned up a mount, then in a fit of holiday spirit conjured up the pet food that made her mount suddenly transform into a Christmas reindeer, and yes, it flew.

Then it was off across the city to do some shopping!

The Christmas-garbed elf on a flying reindeer was out of campus and halfway to the shopping district when she suddenly recalled that she had no money. After only a bit of indecision, she turned her faithful steed into gang territory, treasure sense still on.

The ability to sense piles of cash or drugs made that a fairly quick trip. Just fly around until you find a large stash of both and you've located a gang's distributing center. Land outside, blow away thugs on watch with an Arcane Explosion, hit the house with a couple of bolts of fire (just enough to rattle those inside), hit that with a Cone of Cold to put the fires out, then walk in the front entrance while all of the thugs flee out the back and sides. Hit the ones trying to carry out the cash with a Blizzard, then flash fry anyone annoying.

Collect loot, go shopping!

She was back in the air in under two minutes.

Landing outside of a sort of antique curio shop catering mostly to tourists and the eccentric, Jared decided "why not?" and just rode the reindeer right in through the glass double doors, onto the fancy and expensive carpet, and spotted what she was after right away.

As stunned tourists gawked at her (hmm, maybe that had something to do with the glowing green eyes? Or maybe the pointed ears? No, it was probably that her reindeer hadn't stopped flying, and was hovering a good foot above that expensive carpet), a flustered employee came up to her stuttering, and she just overrode that by opening up her big red santa sack that she'd taken a second to enchant out the wazoo, pull out some of her recently liberated cash, count out the correct amount, slap the still-flustered employee in the face with it, grab arcade game, stuff in sack (that had eyes bulge on everyone watching as the bag clearly wasn't that big), then ride back out the door and fly away, shouting, "Merry Christmas to all, and to all a goodnight!"

Back inside of the store one of the tourists dropped her purse. Of the many that were not shocked immobile, they were still filming with cellphones on the odd chance the elf on a flying reindeer would come back.

No place in town that she knew of sold ingots of metal, so instead she turned her face towards a largish fabric specialty store, landed, dismissed the reindeer and walked in, and while the staff and clientele gawked at her openly, summoned a warcraft pet: a little gnome in red winter costume that in the game was useless for anything but cute factor, but Jared was surprised to find in the store the gnome immediately picked up on what she was doing and started to help pick out fabrics.

She had none of the rare fabrics necessary to make any of the higher end tailoring recipes, and none of the materials to make the engineering patterns for looms that would make those cloths, but a few dozen yards of silk and wool would provide a starter set of magical clothing.

Spending more than two hours in that store was a pleasure, although she started to draw an audience before too long. Taking her selections up to the register as the crowd filming with their phones melted away before her, she paid for everything, stuffed it all into her santa sack that was way too small in any measurement to fit those bolts of fabric, summoned back her reindeer after a fresh use of the consumable that made whatever mount she had appear as a reindeer because, well, you know, there were now impressionable little kids gaping at her in the audience, and rode out the automatic glass doors.

Right into the face of a news van, that had been filming in through the front doors of a shop that had apparently barred them entrance, possibly for fear of spooking the unknown cape who know one knew how she might react.

It was at that point Jared realized that she hadn't bothered to cover her face.

Oh, and it was also apparently the cue for the gang enforcers loitering around the entrance and surround her, bandanas over their lower faces. Jared recognized none of the gang colors nor symbols, but by what she could see of their faces, as well as their clothes, they looked vaguely Asian.

One stood forward, cockily handling a gun (what kind of town is it where gang members can openly display weapons on live TV and not care?). Pointing it at her face with the hammer pulled back, the gang thug informed her, "This here is Crimson Dragon territory, round eye. You shop here, you gotta pay taxes. Start by dropping the bag."

A single Arcane Explosion took that crew out, dropping the two dozen muggers.

BANG!

The elf's head snapped forward under the impact of a bullet shot from the roof of the building. Then, because warcraft mages would sooner shop naked than without one of their various armor spells up, that same head whipped up and around, tracing the now-flattened bullet back to its source, to see the sniper swearing most profanely as he worked the slide back for another round on his low-power civilian rifle.

~Yeah, you can hunt ducks with that. Against a mage you'd want a small cannon.~

A frost bolt took him out, freezing the corpscicle in mid-motion.

Then it was mounting up and flying away time. Only then did one of the local heroes arrive, flying on an intercept course towards her. For the longest moment she could not imagine why, then recalled that lethal force was frowned on in civilized places.

Oh, pooh.

Dispelling her mount, she just teleported and disappeared.

Back in Uber and Leet's room at the stadium she completed her device, a copy of the one running the world of warcraft simulation, then spent a warm couple of hours wrapped up in blankets, eating conjured food and drinking conjured water while she used up one of the charges on her copy of Leet's power to give her a Dungeons and Dragons experience set up to be every bit as abusive and overpowered as the warcraft one had been.

Just as she got everything set up to start a new training session a chill ran down her spine.

Looking over at Uber and Leet it dawned on her. "Sooner or later one of those two are going to come out to check on me. It may take days, but it'll probably happen before I get done with my next trip. Seeing as how they are both pranksters and I'll be helpless, I don't want to stay in the same room as them."

He didn't even mention being currently female in body (though hopefully not for much longer) and they were both teenage, and thus by definition hormonal, males. She wanted to think better of them that to guess they'd do something about that... but in all honestly wasn't going to risk it.

He transferred his setup over to a new room off in a far different corner of the stadium, taking only his bed, new invention, and his share of the stolen electronic supplies, locked the door, double checked that everything was okay, then hit the remote to start a new adventure, hopefully gaining abilities that were not so limited in versatility.

OoOoO

Author's Notes:

This is never going to come up in the characters' dialog because the main character knows nothing about the standard Worm setup, and the natives only know the universe as it is for them, not as it might have been, but among the changes wrought to the timeline is that with the second alien space whale not splattering itself in a stupid accident, no humans came upon the remains and started experiments using bits of them, forming a secret organization active across dozens of worlds centered on granting out super powers stolen from the splattered whale's body.

So a rather large selection of the most powerful capes of that setting: Alexandria, Legend, Hero, Eidolon, Contessa, Siberian, Coil, to list a few, never got those powers.

Of course, with the second space whale active, most of those shards got distributed. So anyone might have them. Or nobody. Shards don't activate all at once. And the shards that did go active might have safeguards in place limiting those powers effects down to what the whales consider safer levels.

It makes sense to me that if all of the most powerful capes of the setting got their powers from bits stolen out of splattered whale remains, that the ones passed out by a live whale had more safeties on, and so a live whale passing out those same formerly-stolen powers means they might not be as impressive. You never know.


	4. Chapter 4

Stepping on Worm  
Chapter Four

by Skysaber  
aka Perfect Lionheart

OoOoO

On a large flatscreen extended down from the ceiling, too wide and high definition to be a civilian model, two images played, split onto either half and zoomed close in to show extra detail, the videos already having been scrubbed of imperfections to improve quality.

A button was pressed on the keyboard behind a wide, mahogany desk, freezing both frames, one showing an elf girl in a Santa's helper costume stuffing a cabinet-style arcade game into a bag smaller than an ordinary duffel, the other showed the same elf killing gang members with an explosion of unidentified energy.

"Analysis."

The curt order was not truly a request, and the scowl behind it was sharp enough to cut like a knife.

Aegis, the cape who had tried an intercept on the elf girl, shifted a bit uncomfortably from foot to foot, while trying to hide his nervousness. The office of the director of the Brockton Bay branch of the Parahuman Response Teams, or the PRT, was not built to put visitors at ease. Clockblocker, the joker on their team, had dubbed the decorating style "Government Stern", and after a while that had stuck as the assessment was spot on. While expensive, the room was void of any comforts save those of the director herself. This was not a place for happy thoughts, and the architecture itself appeared to be designed to make you feel sorry for upsetting the woman behind the desk; a cynical, bitter and heavyset woman who was angry at the world and sometimes oozed resentment from every pore.

Now was not one of those times, thank God, but knowing the unloved and unlovable woman had called him on the carpet for the sole purpose of chewing him out for not catching a teleporter, when he could not teleport, Aegis had a hard time enjoying the knowledge that at least he wasn't going to catch her at her legendary worst.

Because normal for her was still pretty bad.

The room was actually a good reflection of its owner. Aegis knew what everyone did about his boss, Director Piggot, that she had once been a field agent, part of the teams of normals that fought capes, until an op went bad in the worst possible way. She'd survived, but barely, and her injuries had confined her to working behind a desk ever since.

He also knew that though she worked hard she was friendless, and mean. Change her last name to Scrooge and you could expect the Ghost of Christmas Past to drop everything and make an emergency appearance. ~And,~ Aegis mused, ~with a Christmas themed elf flying around on a reindeer, maybe that was not as fanciful a wish as it once had been.~

And worse still for a director in charge of parahumans, Piggot hated capes, seriously hated them, to the point where now, decades after her injuries, she'd still rather hobble around on partially crippled legs and put up with daily dialysis to compensate for her ruined kidneys, than consent to be healed by parahuman abilities.

That was something Aegis couldn't comprehend. One of the independent hero groups of Brockton Bay had Panacea, and if there was a better healing cape in the entire world he'd never heard of them. Panacea's healing was painless, fast and trouble-free. And she had *never* failed to come provide healing on a moment's notice if the PRT called on her for an emergency. She routinely healed injuries worse than Piggot's (the only thing she couldn't heal was brains), so the director could be free of her pain and disability in half an hour or less, for the price of a phone call - and yet Piggot would rather clutch her anger to her chest and embrace the pain than be healed by a parahuman. Her resentment was that strong.

Not for the first time, Aegis wondered how such a person came to be in charge of an organization that gave orders to capes. Even if she was only a branch director.

Of course, all of that had been true earlier, but it had grown an order of magnitude worse when Nilbog, the cape responsible for her injuries and the villain she and her now deceased teammates had been trying to take down, had been recruited into the Protectorate and was now one of few capes responsible for giving her her marching orders.

Worse still, Nilbog's goblin creations in all their myriad, monstrous forms now represented something like 50% of the combat effectives fielded by the PRT, at this and every other base, and made up most of the security details charged with the protection of PRT facilities and staff. So the very same kinds of creatures responsible for her injuries stood guard outside of her office door right now.

Director Piggot was now a seething pit of hatred against the world, and she made sure that every one of her subordinates knew it.

~And the saddest thing of all,~ Aegis reflected, suppressing a somewhat depressed sigh, ~Was that among the PRT directors she didn't stand out at all, except as a hard worker.~

Armsmaster, the lead cape for Brockton Bay, standing there in his famous set of blue and silver tinkertech armor he'd made for himself, (and a high-tech halberd that Clockblocker had more than once referred to as a Swiss Army Polearm) answered Director Piggot's demand for analysis with his usual lack of anything resembling interpersonal empathy, discussing the girl on screen as though she were a math problem to be solved, and with an undercurrent of smugness indicating he thought he had an easy answer. "Five foot, nine inches tall, roughly one hundred and thirty pounds, close estimate. The new cape is not in any of our databases until today, that makes her a probable new trigger. Her manifesting holiday themed powers during the holiday season also supports the new trigger theory."

In this universe, gaining one's superpowers was always referred to as a trigger event, and they were always, always, always bad. Like the worst day of your life bad, and then some.

Not surprisingly, lots of capes turned out to be bitter, angry people because of this - which was exactly what the alien space whales wanted, as that made them easier to manipulate into getting into fights.

No, the alien space whales were not nice creatures.

"Powers?" Director Piggot demanded, sour faced as she always was when discussing capes.

Armsmaster stood at stiffly, not out of any need, but as Clockblocker often joked, because the broomstick up his ass did not allow his spine to bend that much. "At least a minor Brute rating for lifting a stand-alone arcade game one-handed and taking a bullet to the back of her head without damage. But primarily a Blaster, with both close and long range attacks. Ice projectile use was caught by the camera crew, which matches her holiday theme. Another report indicates fire. We have not identified the energy used in her close-in area explosion, but I am having samples of the material affected brought in for analyses. It might be related to her ability to manifest projections of a smaller elf, and flying reindeer, so those remain unclassified as yet. She also possesses flight and teleport powers, giving her a fairly high Mover rating as well."

"And the bag?" Piggot asked as if the subject was personally distasteful, which to her it was.

"Could be linked to a pocket dimension, those capes always have grab bag powers, could be tinker-tech. Impossible to say without further evidence." Armsmaster allowed. "If she is a tinker, it would explain having such a wide range of abilities. If that's the case I'd put her around a Tinker 7, because whatever she is doing, she somehow managed to avoid tripping any of the alerts for unusual materials or tool gathering we use to spot newly triggered tinkers, and her devices are small enough to be concealed within her costume. That makes her equipment low cost and usable by virtually any PRT trooper, suitably adapted."

Aegis controlled his reaction so nobody saw his eyes widen. On a (sometimes violated) scale of one to ten, Tinker 7 was a big deal, especially when the government put special effort into catching any and all tinkers they could. Armsmaster himself was only a Tinker 8, and he was justly famous as one of the most powerful and versatile Tinkers the Protectorate had. Less social skill than a baboon, but a genius inventor.

Director Piggot glared at the images on screen. "The eyes?"

Armsmaster was unruffled by the woman's obvious scorn. "The glowing eyes and pointed ears are possibly the result of a tinkertech holo-field to disguise her real features. Or she could have a minor Changer rating and is using that in place of a mask."

~Yeah,~ thought Aegis. ~They didn't have to mention the third possibility. Once in a blue moon someone's power triggering would alter their features somewhat, but it happened so rarely that it didn't deserve discussion. So far people getting mutated by their powers into freakish abominations was almost solely the province of horror stories.~

And with the world situation so grim and desperate right now, most people had no room in their lives for any more horror, so that market had basically burned out and died.

Director Piggot's look was both constipated and mad, as she resentfully replied, "Given a choice between believing this new cape is a Tinker, or a possible combination Brute, Blaster, Mover and Changer, plus either a Master or a Striker rating to account for her apparent ability to either create a flying reindeer, or teleport in a reindeer that she grants flight ability to, I think most of our higher-ups would agree that a simple Tinker is more likely. And I'll assign her that rating on your recommendation."

~No Kidding!~ Aegis once more had to control the involuntary widening of his eyes. ~Most capes have powers worth rating in only a single category. 90% or more fall in two or fewer classifications. Having *five* is all but unheard of! So yeah, just a Tinker is more likely.~

Director Piggot savaged her keyboard with the force of her typing, as though carrying out her animosity against capes on the paperwork concerning them. Aegis had heard through the grapevine that there had been times when maintenance had been forced to replace that thing daily, until they got her one that was rated for a fully grown male gorilla to type on, made for some zoo to test the "infinite monkeys typing" theory.

And he could believe it.

With a slam on the enter key that could have shattered normal plastic, Piggot completed her entry and shared a look at them that was venomous, as though she was a concentration camp victim about to agree with her Nazi captors, 'Why yes! I would love to volunteer for medical experiments. Thank you for the opportunity.'

"Regardless of whether this new cape is a Tinker, or a flying Blaster, or a Teleporter, any of the three of those qualify her for priority recruitment."

Aegis shriveled a little inside. He liked to think he was a hero, and preferred to think he was doing the right thing, and working for the good guys, but then things like 'priority recruitment' came along like slaps in the face. It basically meant, 'We are still going to pretend you have a choice about joining us, but you don't really. And you'd better not resist too much, because we just might eliminate you if you do.'

People the government considered high value got priority recruitment, and it boiled down to they would be hounded and pressured with no limits until they gave in. Endbringer fights made flying blasters and teleporters invaluable, as flying blasters stood among the best capes for their chances to do damage and survive, while massive numbers of teleporters could be used to get other fighting capes on and off the field, a mobility advantage that was basically priceless. Then, of course, the government loved its tinkers.

Panacea was one of those high value capes, and the hero group she belonged to, New Wave, had so many flying blasters among them they basically stayed independent only because they acceded to the PRT's requests better than some of their own employees followed orders. The only difference was the government didn't have to pay New Wave.

Aegis had missed Armsmaster's reply, so tuned in quickly to catch Piggot's demand. "So, what kind of pressure can be brought to bear?"

Armsmaster's face could not be seen, except for the beard escaping the open lower half of his helmet, but his voice was very smug as he replied, "Oh, this little girl is in a great deal of trouble. Our courts won't have any problem at all holding her responsible for nearly thirty deaths in the fabric store incident alone. Plus, sightings have come in from neighbors about an assault on a drug house shortly before by a girl on a flying reindeer, and the initial reports from the autopsies look like we're going to find matches with the kind of wounds her powers inflict. All told that's over fifty deaths in one day we can blame her for."

"Enough to qualify as a 'serious local disturbance by an out of control parahuman'?" You could hear the bureaucratic file header in the sentence she related, as Piggot's eye acquired a malicious glint. "Excellent," she declared, then more of her brutal typing, once again ending with a smash on the enter key that would have broken a lightbulb. "You have your capture order. Any time this elf shows her face, use whatever resources you feel are necessary to bring her in."

Armsmaster turned on his heel and stalked out, leaving Aegis alone to face the Director.

Aegis sweated as the Director's attention shifted focus to him alone, and he braced himself for the tongue-lashing and probable punishment duties he was doubtless to receive.

OoOoO

"Nightingale, sing for me."

The girl addressed was a blonde teenager with bottle-green eyes and a light dusting of freckles across her nose, reclined upon pillows while laying on a padded white silk divan. That order was accompanied by the rattling of a chain attached to the collar around her neck, the other end of that chain bolted to the golden throne over which her owner floated.

The room they were in was done up in a style to strongly suggest an oriental throne room, with statues of gods and demons lined up in ranks around the halls, balconies and gold leaf everywhere, along with nearly every surface being painted or carved, or both.

Nightingale had seen other parts of the underground base but rarely, and those were substantially cheaper. The ones nearest to this room being the most decorated, but giving way to bare stone walls and sewer tunnels beyond that. But she did not know for certain, having seen only glimpses of the smallest part of her owner's headquarters. Most of her life had been reduced to this one room, and a small adjoining chamber that amounted to a personal bathroom.

Really, it was the master bath and properly belonged to her master, but he never used it. So it became effectively hers, and the depressing part about that was she was effectively his; a pet, or toy, however you wanted to call it.

Nightingale had once had other names, once been a free girl with parents and a normal life under her birth name, then once her power had activated and her parents began to use it for their own purposes, she'd taken another when she'd become a teenage runaway. Back then she had been proud and independent, confident in her power that most often left her the smartest person in any room.

She had not been as secure as she'd imagined.

The gangs had caught her, sold her. Her power had been recognized and one of the significant players interceded before she could be sent to a brothel (out of which she would doubtless have escaped in short order), and instead sent her to be conditioned, giving her the choice: to become what they wanted, a loyal, pampered pet and docile servant, using her power to support her owner, or never leave there alive.

It had been a cape with a Master power doing the conditioning, some guy in China who did this for a living with all sorts of captured girls. On her best days Nightingale told herself they had failed, that she'd spoofed them and retained far more of her original personality than they ever would have allowed normally, but on her worst days, she admitted they had succeeded in rewriting her personality more than she would have liked.

Part of that was she was Nightingale now, for to use any name for herself other than what her master had given her was forbidden, and she had not yet managed to break her conditioning enough to try.

She ate and slept in the throneroom at her owner's feet, and had even been brought to it both drugged and blindfolded to ensure her the least possible chance of being able to use her power to plot out an escape for herself.

For hers was the power of Insight! A powerful Thinker ability that gave her understanding of clues found in microexpression, clothing and stance, breathing and everything else about a person, and to a lesser extent even places or things. She could cold read a person in ways that would make professional fortune tellers green with envy, often picking out obscure or even hidden details about a person's life given only moments of contact.

Her parents had once used her power to gain advantages in business, and Nightingale had to admit she'd been a fool to run away, because her new owner did the same, only leaving her far less dignity.

The fact that her only attire was closely based on Slave Leia's metal bikini out of Star Wars, modified a bit for extra comfort as it had to be if she was to wear it for years, ought to be clue enough even for a normal person. One more item reinforcing that she was property, as if the metal slave collar welded to a chain that was bolted to the throne was not enough.

The chain was just long enough to let her use the master bathroom whose door was mere feet behind the throne, and that was it. It would not reach any other entrance, and she was punished when she pushed those boundaries even a bit.

As per her conditioning, Nightingale was demure and polite, meek and respectful, always attentive and spoke only when commanded to by her owner. As part of her isolation, arranged to prevent her from using secrets revealed to her by her power from spreading blackmail rings throughout the hidden fortress and taking over, she was allowed to speak to no one but her owner, and no one else spoke to her. She might easily enough have broken that rule, but she was almost never out of her owner's sight.

A pet bird indeed.

Two members of her owner's gang had already begun wheeling out the TV the moment the short video was over, which was also the moment she began speaking, as to cause her owner a delay waiting for her answers was forbidden.

"The PRT are going to want to put her on priority recruitment. Normally the paperwork on that takes a week, Piggot will have it done today. Normal procedure is to start soft, with 'all reasonable methods' tried first, she'll give Armsmaster a kill order on the girl if they think that will drive her into their arms faster."

The guy on the throne laughed, genuinely amused. "Yes, Director Piggot is like that. Tell me why they desire this new girl so."

Nightingale closed her eyes to better concentrate on the memory. Seeing the video of the elf girl only once was a handicap, but she'd learned to deal with it. "Because she represents hope. They will give themselves excuses that this is about her powers, but it isn't. There is no way they could reliably know about those so early. Half of what she did could be faked by working with the right tinker, and there are some independents who could've done this. By taking on the Christmas theme so closely, that girl has earned herself a free ticket to enormous positive relations with the public. And the PRT are too callous and heavy-handed. They are always struggling to build up their image before yet another scandal tears it down again. So they are jealous and want her popularity working on their side. Plus, Piggot will personally resent the new elf's Christmas theme as soiling the holiday, in her opinion."

"And will they capture her?"

"No," Nightingale answered seriously. "Not from what they'll find from today's shopping trip. They will try, and I would not normally bet against them when they decide to cross over the lines, as they will. They will check the bullet that hit her head for any blood or hair fragments caught in it, hoping to do DNA testing to identify her. They'll also go over every counter she touched in that fabric store, looking for fingerprints. But unlike normal women she did not take off her gloves to feel the texture of the fabric before buying it, and that bullet was stopped by some kind of force field."

Once again that laugh. "Ah, they so easily violate the unwritten rules against pursuing capes in their secret identities, when they feel it is to their benefit! Naturally, they would not wish to see this little incident reported on, would they Nightingale?"

"No," she replied, they truly wouldn't. The introduction of capes into the world had done a lot to destabilize it, and only a flimsy patchwork of partial fixes kept most of it running. A big part of those patches consisted of a series of unwritten rules that kept things at limited conflicts rather than total war between villains and government. Of those, possibly the biggest was the rule 'don't go after capes in their civilian identities - even if you know them'.

But her owner was right, the government kept that rule less often than they should, much less often than would be wise, especially when they felt they could get away with it, which most often meant pushing that boundary with new capes, the ones who didn't know any better yet. So far the government had been lucky, most of those violations ending in the successful recruitment of the cape they'd unfairly targeted, so they wouldn't testify against their new employer, or in a quiet 'hush job' so the story could not easily get out.

But they were definitely pushing the envelope of what non-government capes would accept and be willing to tolerate. It was the sort of thing that was going to blow up in their faces sooner or later.

And Piggot was certainly the sort of person whose behavior would make that 'sooner'.

Nightingale was almost surprised at her owner's good humor, though. Her remark about the elf cape wearing gloves and not touching the fabrics to feel for texture would normally have hit her owner on his primary sore spot - he hadn't touched anything in nearly thirty years, and missed it sorely.

Her boss had been one of the early triggers. Chinese, low-level government functionary and member of their communist party. Middle thirties when he triggered. He'd been caught in some illegal act, the very fact that she had yet to ferret out details meant that whatever it was, it hadn't been that important to him as he barely even thought of it anymore. Still, whatever it was, he had been sentenced to die, and really hadn't wanted to.

She could easily imagine the looks of surprise on everyone's faces as the bullets from the firing squad went right through him without touching him.

He had wanted power, and he'd wanted invulnerability, and after a fashion he had gotten both. Her boss was strictly intangible, he could go through anything. Nothing she knew of could affect him. He was also a powerful telekinetic, and the combination proved to be all but irresistible, as he could hurt those he felt like hurting, but was all but unstoppable in turn.

But he could never turn it off, so for the past nearly thirty years he had lived as a ghost, a specter, almost an illusion save for the fact that his telekinesis was strong enough to chuck cars about.

At some point he had had some kind of encounter with Tian, who proved more than able to destroy him, but for some reason left him alive, and afterwards her boss had fled that country in fright, never to go back.

Ships couldn't move him, airplanes couldn't carry him, and cars and trucks drove right through him even if he tried to stay connected. So he'd walked out of the country, across the ocean, made a few stops various places in the orient before being treated as an evil spirit got on his nerves and he wound up here, in America.

The cape name the PRT had assigned to him when they'd first begun hearing about his crimes and got proof of his intangibility was Lo Pan, after the ghostly villain in some cult classic movie. But after some initial confusion as to why they'd called him that, he'd at last seen the movie and decided he liked the comparison, and had even begun playing up to it, to amuse himself.

That was why his current parahuman enforcers were called The Seven Storms, after the superpowered minions of the chief villain in that movie.

She knew that he had even selected who to focus his recruitment efforts on based primarily upon how well their powers fit into a storm theme, and had since invested in costumes and training to make the comparison to the lieutenants of the movie villain stronger.

To him it was a joke, a form of amusement, just like keeping her nearly naked when her body was more out of reach to him than the girls on magazine covers were to young boys. It was all a game to play to keep himself busy, a distraction from the torment of not having had anything like a sense of touch or taste or smell for nearly thirty years.

Lo Pan floated above a gold painted throne, still wearing the prison jumpsuit he had gone before the firing squad in. In the intervening years his fingernails and toenails had grown long and scraggly, not able to touch anything to cut or break them off. His hair and his beard had grown as well, wild and unkempt because the man could not even touch himself to groom them. If he still needed to eat or drink or breathe he would have perished nearly thirty years ago, but apparently his power took care of those.

As she could personally attest, he had also never once used his own bathroom.

So he existed nearly as a ghost, his only amusement to play with those around him. With his telekinesis he could rob banks and other places easily enough, and still TK that money around to pay people, and out of that he had gradually produced a growing empire.

"Sing for me again, Nightingale. Tell me about the girl."

So Nightingale began. "She is married. No woman outside of a serious, committed, long term relationship cares so little about the attentions of men around her. Even lesbians pay more heed to whether men are noticing them than that. Her costume is factory made but she is a seamstress herself. She bought cloth and thread but no needles or patterns or other tools, so must have access to those already..."

Nightingale blinked several times as her power suddenly connected several minor facts in her memory, barely seen through the store window, to bring forth a new conclusion. "Also her gestures were programmed, not natural. When she moved, or sighed, flicked hair out of her eyes, took something out of her bag, or summoned her reindeer, she did it the exact same way every time. So she may be a projection herself, either that or under the control of someone with a master power."

OoOoO

On a bank of twelve monitors in a dark room two were still flickering with motion, while the remaining ten had each been frozen on scenes showing the use of different powers. The face on each screen was the same, that of the elf girl in Christmas costume.

The two running monitors, side by side, kept showing the elf's pair of filmed appearances on continuous loop until a remote got raised and both paused.

"Well, what do you think?" Suit A asked from the shadows.

"What's the source on this?" Suit B asked from the other side of the table, none of their features evident in the dimly lit room.

"The usual," Suit A replied casually. "The Media Truce is working out great, one of our better plans really. The gangs agree to leave the media alone when they are filming paranormal activity, and we don't prosecute anything we see the gangs do in those clips. Filming of capes has more than tripled since that went into effect, giving us more information on their powers. Our deal with the media that we get to carefully censor anything concerning capes before it goes out on the air also serves us well, since we can use that leverage on new triggers like this one. If they get caught on camera committing crimes then we approach and tell them they can join up and we'll make the evidence go away, or they can refuse, in which case that film goes out on the air and the public demands they pay for those crimes. Recruitment is up over forty percent since the new policy was implemented."

"I'm certain it does not hurt having those new laws that basically make any non-government use of cape powers on unpowered humans without permission to be a crime," Suit B replied cynically, folding his fingers before him.

"Public fear of parahumans, spurred on by the various villain groups out there, can be a useful tool when pointed in the right direction, yes," the other smugly agreed.

"So how soon should we see this new girl enter service?" Suit B inquired.

Suit A's voice grew even more smug. "I'm certain we can have her in before Christmas."

OoOoO

"C'mon! Wake up!"

Jared awoke to find someone violently shaking him. No sooner had he blinked than the person was assisting him to his feet. Why was there smoke in this room?

"C'mon! We've gotta get out of here right away! The building is on fire. We're lucky it is mostly on the other side of the stadium, but it could be spreading, and this smoke is dangerous enough!"

Leaning against the shoulder of the blonde who was helping him as they took the direct route out of the building, Jared cataloged what he knew. Thankfully, at the top of that list was the fact that he was adult and male now. Good, so that part of his setup had worked, so he didn't have to prank Uber and Leet so hard in retaliation now the problem was fixed. Second, he was leaning on the shoulder of a blonde haired girl, mid to late teens, hair all of the way down her back past her beltline, dressed in a volleyball uniform?

He might have said part of that out loud, because as they got outside onto the dead grass and under a leafless tree, she said, "My high school is allowed to use some of the college sport facilities to practice. I was here with our volleyball team, over there," she pointed, and indeed there was a much larger group of girls, along with a few adults counting heads.

The cheerful blonde started steering him in that direction, still chatting, "The lights went out, and the fire alarms went off, but when Mrs. Beasley tried to get all of us out in an orderly fashion I was near the back, and saw some lights still flashing in what I'd thought was an empty room, and not wanting anyone else to get trapped I went looking and found you."

Here she blushed. "Although, I had to beat apart some tinkertech device with a bat before you would wake up. I hope you're not mad."

As an explosion caused by something electrical ripped apart that part of the building where he had been, Jared admitted, "Nope! Not mad at all. Thank you. I owe you my life, miss..?"

"Mina. Mina Lovejoy," She smiled brightly, an impish twinkle in her eyes. "Now let's join up with my friends so we can find you some pants."

Looking down, Jared realized he'd undressed for bed, expecting to wake up with the girl's Christmas outfit not fitting. Blushing from head to toe, he cast a quick, "Major Creation!" and was in that instant garbed in clothes whose quality was based on his skill at making clothes.

Since he had max ranks in that, and was absurdly high level, the clothes fit perfectly, suited his colors and the season, and frankly exceeded those normally seen by people who bought off the rack. Actually royalty was rarely garbed as well as he was.

"You have a superpower to make clothes?!" His teenage helper clearly proved herself a girl in how excited she got over that, partway releasing the hold she had over him to examine his outfit, and clearly impressed thereby. "Does it work for anyone, or just you?"

Jared laughed, renewing both the hold and their march. "Mina, you saved my life. I can at least do clothes in gratitude. Do you want your closets filled?"

"We can talk about that later," she agreed. "Mostly, I'd just like to be friends."

"I can do that too," he acquiesced, feeling giddy in relief, as the silent divination spells he had been running in the background revealed to him that Uber and Leet had just tried to kill him by overloading the electrical system of the stadium!

The note he'd left hadn't told them what room he'd changed to, so they'd just sent an attack through the entire building, hoping to get him through his tinkertech training device!

When he asked why, his divinations returned that both had risen as undead that hated the living, and they both saw him as their greatest threat because he knew the source of their current powers.

~Oh, boy. That is going to cause problems.~

Worse still, that pair had trained as warcraft Rogues, with enough stealth ability that without trapping them in a fairly narrow search area, finding them was all but impossible. ~Plus they woke before me this time, so there is no telling how much of a head start they had. The pair could be anywhere.~

Luckily, training without Uber and Leet to distract him had gone faster, so Jared had already gotten the core of what he'd been after, but not a lot of the extras. But that would have to wait for a bit, as they had just arrived.

"Hey, mister... what is your name again?" Mina's nose screwed up in concentration.

"Jared, Jared Saotome."

The bright and bubbly blonde then turned to introduce him. "Well Jared, these are my friends! This is Amy, that is Lita, over there is Serena, and arguing with her is Rae. We just came in from Japan a couple of years ago when the housing prices skyrocketed in Tokyo after Kyushu sank. The government even seized the land of Rae's family shrine!"

"Pleased to meet all of you," Jared told them in earnest, with all of the sincerity of his heart.

OoOoO

Author's Notes:

First CYOA advantage point spent: Companions. He'll take the Sailor Scouts, unpowered local versions.

I had to do it, because there is not much of a story when the protagonist does not have something worth defending to fight for, and all of the in-genre characters are so damaged (soiled too for that matter, messed up is probably the best summary) that there is no reason he would bond with them as quickly or easily as he would need to in order to have them as his reason for fighting. And conflict is coming up rapidly.

Lacking any personal attachment to the city, he'd have no reason to stay or fight, and every reason to leave, as bad guys are looking for him there.

Also, I am using the AU status to alter some characters quite a bit. That's because evil in Worm is omnipresent. But it is mostly the "constant indignity, constant oppression, death by a thousand cuts" style of evil.

Now there is no way to accurately recreate that without making my story every bit as dark and depressing as the source material. No way am I going to tolerate that.

Yeah, I am not going to drag my readers through filth just to have them learn how bad these bad guys really are (and most of the worst ones pass themselves off as heroes! - Worm suffers under a sickening amount of the "bad guys are good, good guys are bad" idiocy).

So the villains you see here will actually be significant less odious and vile than in the source material, because I will have tipped them out of gritty, grimdark, and pushed them just a little over the top to be more classic comics style interpretations.

They are here to get their faces punched in, not to make the reader's eyes bleed with how badly you want to.

If it helps, tell yourself things get changed around by the distortion effect of thirty years of AU history.


	5. Chapter 5

Stepping on Worm  
Chapter Five

by Skysaber  
aka Perfect Lionheart

OoOoO

"Nothing real was supposed to happen!" Uber insisted in a whisper/shout, trying his best not to give away their position to any listeners despite his rage. After all, if somebody saw them now there would be no bluffing out of this one. They didn't look normal anymore.

"You know how my power glitches," Leet deflected apologetically, shrinking in on himself as though to make for a smaller target. Admittedly, they'd had some screw ups before this, but he'd never seen his teammate and best friend quite this upset before.

"Well, whoever said that undead were 'cool' should DIE!" Uber raged, stalking about the room they'd used like a wild animal in a burning den.

Nobody would be attracted to Uber's body builder physique now. Actually, neither of them were happy about their current appearance. Both had woken up as rotting corpses, their flesh green with decay overall, but with some patches worse than the rest. It was worst around the elbows and knees where there was nothing but bone showing clearly through. Other places they had holes where flesh might have been, but wasn't.

Actually, it was unnatural that either could speak as their jaws were the next worst sites of corrosion. So neither had lips or tongues for forming words anymore, their cheeks were sorely lacking, and there were some rather notable holes in what was formerly their respiratory systems, back when they were alive.

"I'll help you kill every Anne Rice 'undead are cool' fangirl out there," Leet promised, grabbing cables and hooking together computer parts. "But first we have to fix this!"

"What happened to that guy? The one who got us into this?" Uber continued stalking, his continued rage clear in every step.

"Well, if we woke as undead, she must be a female blood elf," Leet hissed, plugging his monstrosity of a self-built server without a case or other niceties into a leftover internet jack in the wall. Seconds later a search for 'blood elf' had found a few smartphone videos of her, uploaded by people directly instead of sold to the media which still had not commented on the girl or made mention of her arrival.

Fans of the warcraft game were miles ahead of the official channels and government types in that they had already nailed the connection between her appearance and spells used and blood elf mages of the MMO, and were in the midst of arguing over what name to give her (Elf Mage was being shouted down as too generic). And because of the game theme a couple of fans had already connected her appearance to Uber and Leet.

Correctly, as it happened. But that praise did not presently please them.

"Yeah, well, he got us into this. And taking away our BALLS goes completely beyond the pall!" Uber raged, shouting as silently as he could manage, so as to not draw attention in, you know, a college stadium.

Leet too, was rather annoyed at having his male parts rotted completely off. Somehow, however, he didn't feel like pointing out that, in making their employer a chick, they'd pulled that particular prank first. And they'd done it deliberately, too.

But they were not thinking reasonably at the moment.

According to most experts on the subject of life energy, humans, like most living things, are a slight mix of both positive and negative, but come in as overwhelmingly positive overall. They have to in order to live. So even the most depraved, wretched serial killer is going to come in as more positive than negative on the life energy scale.

If a human, or other living thing, gets too much negative life energy in them their bodies fall into a variety of grotesque diseases and they die.

Something most people don't pause and consider enough is that, according to those same experts on life energy, the overwhelming majority of undead are purely fueled by the negative side. So they are all negative life energy, all of the time. And that has a major impact on their emotions and thought processes (among those undead that have any).

Most humans have got huge wells of positive feelings like kindness, honesty, compassion, love and so forth ready to go at all times, just waiting for an appropriate circumstance to trigger them. Not all people *use* them, but those wells are available all the same.

Almost nobody sits down and thinks through what a person's mind would be like if all of those potential positive feelings vanished so they weren't even there, and you could not reach them if you tried, while at the same time endless supplies of anger, hate, depression, rage, fear and other dark thoughts or emotions came crowding in.

Take the nicest man you know, make him undead, and he is going to make most serial killers look like they don't even try. Typical undead will wave off Hitler as only halfway out of his amateur status, and point out all of the opportunities he missed out on for being more cruel, insane, homicidal, and otherwise horrible.

In minutes after waking up, both Uber and Leet had managed to convince themselves that their suffering was all the new guy's fault, and he'd have to die for that. So, deciding that it would take all day to search the building and their target might wake up before they found him, they rigged up the stadium's electrical system to go into a lethal surge.

"That oughta get him," Leet leaned back from having horribly violated the breaker box, leaving behind a mutilated mass of cables that nonetheless would give them time to get out of there safely before anything blew.

Although the system was already heating up and about to spark a fire. So they got out of there, going into stealth mode to sneak out to their truck, which was still parked in the employee lot with forged parking permits.

As he was about to pull out of the lot, Uber blinked in sudden realization, and asked. "Hey Leet, did we seriously just construct a death trap and leave our enemy in it, expecting him to die but not bothering to stay and witness it?"

For a brief moment that realization hung in the air betwixt them, along with the oft-quoted phrase, "Death traps never work!"

Leet immediately began to build himself a phone. "I am going to call in some extras to finish her off, screw the burning building."

Uber nodded at that, making a left turn out of the campus lots onto a more trafficked road. "Nowhere near as good as hunting her down ourselves, but unless we want to be outed as undead and have the entire world join forces against us, that's not going to happen."

"Yeah," Leet agreed, somewhat depressed about that facet of their current existence. "But if there's been anything good about having been freelance villains in this town for a while, we've got a broad list of contacts."

Leet dialed a self-built phone, hearing it answered on the first ring he started with, "Hey, do you want to know where to find that Christmas Elf?"

OoOoO

An elegant hand encased in flowing robes whose silk sleeves were embroidered in dragons with golden thread lifted the phone to a head of very stylized straight black hair that listened for a while. The dainty, delicate hand then gently replaced the antique styled phone into its golden cradle, selected the top of a stack of parchment quality note cards, wrote out something upon it in careful calligraphy, and placed it on a golden tray.

Having done all of this, the classically beautiful oriental woman took up the tray and sashayed into the next room, where a blond martial artist wearing kung fu pants and otherwise stripped to the waist, displaying dragon tattoos going up and down his upper body, lounged on a golden throne watching a fighting tournament take place on the sands of the pit before him.

Placing the tray near his elbow, she bowed and silently withdrew.

After watching the conclusion of that fight of the martial arts tournament taking place among his followers for his amusement, the man reached down and took the note, reading it before selecting one of several stamps carefully arranged near his opposite elbow.

Stamping the missive, "Find her and kill her", the villain clapped his hands, calling for the next round of the tournament.

A second silent servant came, bearing that message away to the lieutenant who would carry out the order.

OoOoO

In a filthy drug den of prutescent foulness, Skidmark, a black cape, drug dealer and user, badly affected by years of addiction, canceled the call, a wide grin showing his rotting teeth. Kicking a pile of rags that got revealed by its reaction to be a person, Skidmark opened his rotted, filthy mouth, and...

The scene froze.

Narrator's Voice. "The BBC would like to apologize for the following conversation. Skidmark's use of filth and profanity could shock veteran dockworkers. Having been deemed unsuitable for children, his dialog will be replaced by a voiceover performed by Sir Henry Charles."

Skidmark's lips began moving, spewing forth bile and spittle, but without sound. After a moment's pause, the diatribe was overlaid by cultured British tones, "Egads! What a brilliant opportunity!"

Skidmark kept speaking for several more seconds, although it was clear the meaning had been condensed out earlier in the much shorter phrase.

The druggie on the floor who had been kicked awake rose partway up, and still stoned, muttered, "Wha?"

Skidmark kicked him again, mouth moving in what was probably a shout directed at his underling. Once more the voiceover came though in mild, sophisticated and educated phrases. "Strive for perfection in all that you do. Take the best that exists and make it better."

The noiseless shouting continued for several more moments, accompanied by several more kicks.

Drawn by the noiseless shouting, several more filthy and infested drug addicts began to stir from different parts of the warehouse.

One of the most disgusting, filth-encrusted creatures imaginable rose from his pile of vomit and refuse, drug tracks up the veins of both arms amidst his tattoos and signs of infection, and said...

Nothing?

His mouth moved, but it was a lady's cultured voice that followed out of synch with his lip movements. "I say, are you quite alright?"

Narrator's Voice. "The voice of Mush is being performed by the Lady Victoria Heather."

Skidmark rounded on the rare individual who was even filthier than he was. "Sir, I have the mortification to inform you that I have been forced to reprimand most severely these our servants who have failed to perform up to a level befitting our station. Furthermore, unless we make haste with all speed we can expect, in due course, an opportunity most precious to be lost to our cause forever."

"Truly?" Mush swore, overwritten by a lady's voice.

"Indeed," Skidmark cursed. "You are aware, I am certain, of the arrival into our fair city of a maiden of elflike countenance and merry disposition? Owing to the nature of her appearance, she has wrought upon the minds of the people, partly by her choice of costume and heroic theme, such that there is scarcely an inhabitant of this country who does not already love her. Should we acquire her services, via the forced consumption of addictive substances, and entrap her into prostitution, our fortunes should increase most dramatically."

Skidmark had stopped speaking and started moving to some trucks before the voiceover was halfway done speaking.

"I see," the lady's voice overrode Mush's curse as he spat into the garbage.

OoOoO

Deep under the Brockton Bay PRT headquarters was a heavily fortified sub-basement that was used as housing for their underaged heroes, also known as the Wards program. In that secure dormitory, a heavy security locked door cracked open after a slight warning and delay that the current occupant ignored, admitting one Aegis to the common room.

"Regent? Get up, you're being called into action."

The lazy teen lying on the sofa in the midst of snack bags and a few colas looked up from his console game in annoyance. "Again? What is it this time?"

Aegis as always swallowed his annoyance with the younger teen, reminding himself once more how much their country owed to his family. "We've got a reliable tip as to the location of that Christmas Elf. Armsmaster wants all resources available."

The cape known as Regent reluctantly put down his game controller and sighed, as if put upon by the most unreasonable demands possible, while Aegis once more struggled to hold his tongue. It had been four days since the petulant younger teen had seen any call of duty whatsoever, and that had been a drill, while the rest of the Wards team had to man the communications console round the clock and run patrols on a routine basis.

But the country would have failed if not for Regent and his family, so once more Aegis held his peace.

Regent himself had told him frankly and honestly that his father had not had any intention of saving anything or anyone, at least at first. Regent's father, Heartbreaker, had the kind of power most teenage boys' wet dreams were made out of, in that he could manipulate the emotions of people he met however he wanted. Within only a few seconds of contact, Heartbreaker could make celebrities fall in love with him, women want to bear his children, and men drop all other loyalties in order to serve him, or do anything else he pleased so long as it had an emotional basis.

Heartbreaker had the kind of Master power that everyone was terrified of, and he had used that to its fullest. Even Regent had no idea as to the full count of his moms and half-siblings, but it was in the hundreds. Heartbreaker had taken over a Canadian town and had been living the high life with no intention of stopping. The PRT sent teams of agents in to kill him several times, and each time they just fell under his sway, giving Heartbreaker more guards.

But the thing about giving yourself over wholly to a life of pleasure is that it sort of depends upon a supply of pleasures. Heartbreaker could convince people under his sway to slip out of town and commit robberies for him with ease, but when there are no luxuries to steal, none get stolen.

Regent had admitted to everyone in the Brockton Bay PRT that Heartbreaker would never have cared one bit about the world situation if the flow of goodies hadn't stopped.

Delicate infrastructure like oil fields, refineries and pipelines were distressingly easy for wide assortments of cape powers to break, and yet very expensive and time consuming even for tinkers to fix. And without oil to ship their food, heat their homes or burn for power, even the major countries suffered distress very quickly.

With the world in tumult, lots of the less than stable countries had already collapsed, and that trend had continued up to larger and larger ones as the oil producing nations stopped producing oil, and so on. Manufacturing began to dry up, and as conflicts spread all over it looked like even the United States was going to dissolve into so many cape-led fiefdoms.

Analysts had said the United States was on the edge and teetering, an inch from going out altogether, when Heartbreaker discovered that no matter how many teams of thieves he sent out, he could not get himself a brand new wide screen TV of the new model that had been advertised. Then the town's electricity had gone out for the final time, and an outraged Heartbreaker had demanded his followers look into the situation. They discovered quite easily that the country, actually the whole world, was in a state of breakdown, and unless someone did something the flow of goodies was about to be cut off forever.

The people who had been trying hadn't been succeeding. In fact, no matter what police and the government claimed, things just kept getting worse. And this trend had been going on for years.

So Heartbreaker stepped in. He was too late to save Canada, which had dissolved into a government squealing piteously, issuing demands that nobody listened to as the shipping and power industries had broken down and the peoples' primary concerns had shrunk down to finding their next sources of food and heat.

Regent's dad had walked into the local PRT headquarters, the one that supposedly was in charge of keeping him under quarantine, switched their loyalty over to himself, got them to brief him on the kinds of capes out there, and their various powers, got himself a teleporter to hitch rides with, and went recruiting.

His first stop was at the lair of a villain named Accord, whose power was to make plans, and the more complex the issue, the more brilliant he got at it. The normally fastidious and rigid cape was Heartbreaker's best friend within seconds of the master's arrival, and was churning out plans to save the country right after, a relationship they had continued ever since.

Teacher, a villain who could grant others low level Thinker or Tinker powers, but at the cost of their becoming subject to him, got subjugated in turn by Heartbreaker, churning out hundreds of short-duration thinkers and tinkers to help implement Accord's plans.

For firepower he recruited Nilbog, giving them a small army in the form of the creatures that villain had created. Blasto, a tinker who specialized in creating animated plants, and one of Accord's bitter enemies, got added next, and for the same reason as Nilbog.

With those and other villains suddenly giving their fanatical loyalty to Heartbreaker, Regent's father had simply entered Washington DC, taken control of the government by visiting the White House and Congress and making everyone his best friends, then he issued commands.

The media and government PR departments presented that as him merely offering his help, but to anyone who knew Heartbreaker the true relationship was clear. A master had taken control of the government, and frankly, seeing as how he did so to stop their collapse as a country there were few who aired their complaints.

Heartbreaker's circle of newly acquired villain friends had proven able to contribute enough force to enough places to break through the logjams, quell the riots and calm the populace. Thinkers and Tinkers had gotten the electrical grid in service again, restored shipping and the internet, restarted domestic industry and manufacturing so people had jobs and products again. And everyone agreed that he had saved the country from the very brink of disaster.

So what if government "Of The People, By The People, and For The People," had perished from the earth? At least people had jobs and consumer electronics, right?

With the media telling everyone that everything was fine, most people didn't even know they could hold no elections at all and achieve the same result. It didn't matter what patsy they voted into office, Heartbreaker was still in charge.

So why worry them?

Well, Aegis worried, but he had no better answer. Part of him was concerned that he mostly just wished that Regent hadn't told them that was how everything worked. But apparently having Heartbreaker as your dad brought with it all kinds of emotional baggage, and did all sorts of damage, as Regent simply couldn't imagine why people would care.

Heartbreaker's kids tended to be borderline sociopaths who had trouble comprehending that anyone else had feelings, or why those mattered. And only part of that was due to the fact that Heartbreaker himself caused all of his kids to trigger, using his power to deliberately cause enough emotional trauma for their powers to activate.

On the plus side, that gave the country a couple of hundred extra capes, most of them with some degree of Master powers, and on the minus side, most of them would have been villains if that wasn't rather difficult to do when your dad basically owned the nation, and he set the rules, including what made a person a villain.

So America had a royal family, and Regent was part of it.

The USA had absorbed Canada just because it was less trouble for Heartbreaker to control one government instead of two. Now Mexico was looking at being absorbed next, if they continued to cause trouble in the form of their parahuman drug lords.

Yeah, in most of the rest of the world, the most powerful capes controlled what they liked, and everyone else had to either put up with that or move - and mostly the only places to move were other towns controlled by other capes.

Freedom and liberty didn't really exist anywhere.

Aegis told himself that life was better in the USA, even if they didn't have any of the traditional freedoms anymore. Well, they did, but they'd stopping being rights, just Heartbreaker's whims.

So far he was pretending to let them have their free government, just so long as it didn't do anything to annoy him. But with his recent collection of villains he'd founded the Protectorate, had put himself in charge of it and the PRT, passed a whole bunch of laws in his favor, then put most of his kids into positions of authority and influence.

Apparently gaining and maintaining control over so many people had stretched even Heartbreaker's considerable capacity to its limits. So the villain had brought in his family as well. Those who could assume control of key figures, did so. Others, like Regent, who did not have the right kind of power for controlling others mentally, served in other capacities.

Technically Regent was just another junior hero serving here in Brockton Bay, but it was hard to treat him like that when if something annoyed him enough he could always call his dad and report you. A kid who could bring the White House down on your neck with a single phone call wasn't one to aggravate lightly.

So he pretended to work, and they pretended that was normal.

Unofficially, he was probably spying on them for his dad as much as anything. Officially, his job was one suited to his power. Regent could usurp control of other creatures' bodies, bypassing their nerves, and he got better the more practice he had with a subject.

Well, Nilbog's goblins weren't very bright, and with their short lifespans of 4-5 years at the outside, training wasn't very cost effective. So overall they were left with very simple tasks like security, which their advanced senses made them great at, and humans found boring anyway.

Using goblins out on patrols of the streets was normally out of the question as they were not very discriminating. You were friend or you were foe to them, and that was it. And since the PRT could not hand out 'friend' status to just anyone, using goblins off base would normally end in a slaughter of innocent people. So they got used defensively instead, or in major assaults where the police had already evacuated the area.

Nilbog himself wasn't much help in fixing those problems, as according to rumor the guy wasn't right in the head. And while Heartbreaker could adjust his loyalty, sensitivity and feelings to cause him to feel good about sending his goblins to serve the PRT, he couldn't just fix his sanity. And without that his creations were never going to be terribly bright.

Enter Regent, who could take control of a goblin and pilot it much like it was an avatar in one of his video games. So Regent got his pick of goblins to practice on, with a wide range of abilities from ones with advanced senses, flight or speed, to ones tough and strong enough to serve as mid level brutes.

With Regent's intellect running the show, that goblin could also be outfitted with guns, armor or other equipment. So goblins controlled by him could field some impressive firepower at need. Regent's crown, provided by the government as part of his costume, had tinkertech in it that allowed him to control goblins outfitted with suitable receivers over a considerable distance. So most times he went to fight, Regent himself never left the base.

When the PRT felt like it, they could park a truck with replacement goblins already outfitted by him somewhere near a battle to give Regent access to new bodies on a moment's notice should he somehow lose the one he'd been controlling.

Since goblins were basically disposable, this made Regent one of their heaviest hitters, as he could bring a huge amount of versatility and firepower to bear, all without being in any danger himself. So deploying him had quickly become Piggot's option of choice for every high-risk scenario, as he could bring a goblin with the right power and the right tools for just about any situation they could expect, without risk of losing anything the PRT cared about.

No, rumor had it Director Piggot cackled in glee every time Regent lost another goblin he'd been controlling in combat. And since Regent didn't care about the goblins he controlled (or, Aegis suspected, the welfare of his human teammates either) it caused him no trauma and saved human lives too. Plus, with his pick of goblins and outfitting, Regent easily brought to bear as much flexibility as half a dozen low-tier capes.

Which was why Armsmaster wanted him ready in case they found this Christmas Elf.

Frankly, Aegis knew if Regent didn't consider working a drag, and to be avoided, they'd have used him for ten times as much as they did.

OoOoO

Jared was laughing freely along with his newest friends in between the girls cooing over the latest explosion, like it was some sort of fireworks display.

As Serena, an exuberant blonde who was clearly the leader of the group explained, "Well, the building is going down either way. And nobody's inside, right? So what's the point of being miserable? Might as well enjoy the show!"

And she had a point.

Amy had added further, "She's right. Since nobody is being hurt, the fire is being contained, and the college has fire insurance, why shouldn't we enjoy the show?"

Jared had to concede the point. The streams of water from the attending fire trucks were also very pretty. Huge crowds had turned out to "ooh" and "ahh" over them. The light of the building fire reflecting off the snow, combined with lights from the street lamps casting little rainbows through the fire hose sprays made for a scene that was actually quite lovely.

Lita was even cooking snacks on a portable grill she'd found.

Still, standing, staring at the burning stadium wasn't much of a goal. Jared had quietly, almost unconsciously, the way one scratches an itch, raised all of the components of what he liked to call the "Archmage's Defensive Spell Suite", including things like Mind Blank, Greater Anticipate Teleport, and other 'don't leave home without it' protections.

But once that was in place standing around watching the stadium burn was not productive.

Actually, his next priority was equipment. Characters from Dungeons and Dragons were presumed to have a certain amount of magical gear according to their power level, and he had none. To him, this felt very much like being a firefighter or a soldier without any of their gear, either. Certain things are required if you are to do the job properly.

As a spellcaster, the redhead could approximate a lot of it, but that would be expensive in terms of spell slots spent daily, and you only got so many. So it would free up a ton of his capacity to get himself properly outfitted.

Fortunately, he knew how to do that, too. Jared had known back when he'd been modifying the D&D online game to use for a basis that he wouldn't emerge with any of the gear found inside, and that outside of it the only potential source of magical equipment on this world would be himself, so he'd prepared to create everything he'd need.

The only downside was that would require money and time and (the part resented most by anyone who had ever crafted anything under third edition D&D rules) it also drained a caster of a certain amount of his experience. The greater value of magic items, the larger that loss.

But he'd found a way around that too. Actually the best form of avoiding the experience point loss of magic item creation he'd come up with once a long time ago as a joke, but it should work perfectly fine all the same. It was even the right time of year for it.

"Hey everybody, hows about we all go back to my place for some hot chocolate?" Serena sang, looking eager to be friends. That girl positively radiated happiness, and Jared recalled with fondness someone else saying that it would take considerable effort NOT being her friend - and even then she'd probably still wear you down in the end.

The redhead shook himself out of his current train of thought to realize that the eyes of all of Mina's friends were on him, questioning, and Mina held him in a particularly warm gaze. On seeing that gaze a corresponding warmth appeared in his own chest.

"Sure! Sounds like great fun." He took one step, then his mind flashed back to his copy of Leet's invention that he'd been using to train in powers, that was still left inside of that burning, exploding building. So he amended, "One second."

As sort of a thought experiment, he'd once decided to see how fast one could get a character's movement rate in D&D 3.x, and had gotten it up above a 1,200ft base land speed, which worked out to 200 ft per second - And that was a walking pace that one could keep up all day, not even taking double move actions.

Actual running was quite a bit faster.

Silly, and a bit ridiculous, but hey! When your life was at stake you'd draw out the old notes, blow the dust off, and use it for yourself too. Even if that was metaphorically speaking, and those notes were just your memory of how you'd done it.

And that wasn't the only thought experiment he'd hauled out and made use of.

Without permanent magic items to boost his speed, his pace was quite a bit less than what it would have been if he'd been fully outfitted. Still, it took Jared precisely no time at all to cast a Time Stop so he wouldn't be caught in any explosions, follow it up with an Energy Immunity: Fire, along with a method of breathing in smoke, then dart into the building, find his ruined device (along with the baseball bat Mina had used to beat it to flinders so he'd wake up), tip it up with his foot like a soccer player retrieving his ball, catch it in his magic bag, and be out again to deal with the girls right at the moment his Time Stop ran out.

The tinkertech arcade game was pretty thoroughly trashed. For the hardware that didn't matter, as he could easily build another, as Leet had made an engineering pattern for that. But Jared had burned a tinker slot programming the software, and though there was only a slim chance he'd be able to recover it from the ruined and burnt-out chips, a slim chance was still better than no chance.

"Okay, let's go."

The happy group began to meander toward the bus that could bear them away to an evening of hot chocolate and laughter, when several trucks pulled to a stop between them and that escape method.

Armed men then began to pile out.

OoOoO

Author's Notes:

I'll spare you the gory and depressing details, but according to the source author, the plan of his giant, mutant, alien, multidimensional space whales (before one splattered herself in a rather obvious Deus Ex Machina landing accident, and the other lost the will to live) was to maximize conflict. As part of that they intended to break down human society into groups no larger than 5-10 capes and enough peasants/normals to support them.

No countries, no political parties, no industries, no businesses, no church groups, or club memberships, not even any reasonably sized gangs. Nothing above the size of a fairly small tribe, just a handful of families and their capes.

The end of all human civilization, just so we would provide them with more arena fights on the off chance they might learn something interesting from us as we died.

This must be what a lab rat feels like.

Anyway, the source author makes it clear that with the intentional psychological damage that comes from activating cape powers, along with subtle influences of the shards themselves actively promoting conflict, this was going to be the way human society went anyway, even with one alien space whale dead, and the other brain-dead.

Here, with both whales alive and active, it has proceeded faster.

The source author presents as his solution a secret villain organization guilty of every crime imaginable, but with a special emphasis on assassination and human experimentation, as his key to his world's survival.

Yeah. Their reading of the Worm serial is a good reason to put anyone on suicide watch.

In summary, the group finding the splattered whale form a secret organization they call Cauldron, and if this was Evangelion they would be SEELE, complete with their behind the scenes control of absolutely everything worth mentioning, even indirectly of our plucky group of underaged and mentally damaged would-be heroes who managed to get even more severely psychologically damaged by events throughout the series.

You see now why I constantly draw comparisons between this and Evangelion? I don't even have to do any work! They're all over the place! A bunch of teens thrown in over their heads, trying against all odds to save the world as every adult everywhere fails them? Or worse? When those adults aren't actively betraying them? Oh yeah. The comparisons practically write themselves.

Anyway, this secret organization use alien space whale bits in unspeakable experiments that sometimes work, and very often transform people in freakish abominations. And by cutting out enough of their hearts they can ensure that the sun doesn't go out.

Oh, no. Wait. That last sentence was the Aztecs. My bad. It's so hard to tell, sometimes. When people start dipping into evil far enough it all just starts blurring together after a certain point. Any time one of them starts telling you why they need to perform millions of human sacrifices in order to save the human race, start rolling your eyes. Whatever their supposed reasons are, they are wrong, and they themselves are a major villain. Possibly THE major villain of the piece.

So anyway I amuse myself by turning things on their heads.

According to the source author no splattered space whale - no Cauldron - no Triumvirate (world's greatest hero team who all turn out to be villains) - no Protectorate - no PRT. But I'd already chosen the Protectorate/PRT as one of the villain groups who'd want me dead on my CYOA build, so they had to exist.

He had major villains for a 'hero' group that founded the Protectorate, and gave teeth (in the form of parahuman support) to the PRT. In this case I use a different group of villains in the form of Heartbreaker and those he has subjected to keep things together, accomplishing it with 90% less evil, too! - and doing it all for selfish reasons that actually make sense for those villains, rather than copying Rowling's lame excuse for Dumbledore's evil actions, in that "his magic made him do it."

Yeah. The source author seriously does that, too. "Oh! It had to be that way, because that's what her power was telling her to do!"


	6. Chapter 6

Stepping on Worm  
Chapter Six

by Skysaber  
aka Perfect Lionheart

OoOoO

Just FYI, there have been no editions of D&D since 3.5 for purposes of this story.

OoOoO

"TWWEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEETTTT!"

Jared had cause to regret putting all of those ranks in Listen when Serena went wild blowing on a rape whistle on first sight of the armed men. He'd no sooner shaken the sting out of his ears when he turned to look at the girls, only to find them gone.

Turning further discovered them already in full flight, not just moving but sprinting away from the gang members, Serena blowing on that rape whistle for all she was worth while Amy held up a smartphone over her shoulder, Jared's ranks and bonuses in Spot clearly showing him, despite the small screen and distance, that she had already called 911, and was filming the gang members debark from their trucks - and was somehow also holding the camera steady despite making a greater running speed than he would have thought of the slightly built academic.

One glance at their feet showed all five of those girls wore good quality running shoes, not the flats or heels he might have expected from some of them.

~They've done this before,~ the boys thought's darkened and his eyes narrowed. ~Not just once, either. But often enough they've practiced it down to a science.~

He noted they were not charging off into the darkness where they could be cornered in an alley somewhere, but actually through the most crowded, best lighted areas they could see - but they were not depending on those crowds for cover, either, and he perceived it was done as a warning to the other girls standing nearby as much as anything, giving those less aware then themselves a chance to become alerted to the danger and flee.

Okay, that was impressive.

Standing around passively obeying orders when others are waving guns around trying to take prisoners is a one-way ticket to some of the worst hurts imaginable. For one very brief period of history, back when Victorian England was trying to civilize the globe, surrender to a foe was a reasonable option, because those Victorians saw to it that all sides behaved in as genteel and rational way as they could bully them into.

Yeah, even that civilizing influence only existed because of the use of force.

But throughout the rest of history, surrender was as bad an option as you could imagine. At best it got you enslaved, and most of the rest of the time it earned you a slow death by torture. So standing around expecting to be treated fairly was a bad move, as the era wherein that had been reasonable was as dead as the dodo.

There were still, on occasion, here and there, groups that it would be safe to surrender to. But on the whole you'd never need to, as they were not the ones attacking people.

And running away, even from men armed with guns, was as good an option as most people had if they were not armed themselves. According to the recorded figures, most gun toting thugs were lousy enough shots they were unlikely to hit a running target from as few as thirty feet away. And even if you got hit, most likely you'd live through it. Most gunshot victims actually survived, while very few of those meekly surrendering to thugs did.

Most of the victims of the worst acts of brutality had actually gone along with their captors, hoping that by being obedient and mild they would be treated fairly.

The world had changed, and Victorian England did not set the rules any more. For proof of that, you need look no further than the Jews in the holocaust. They marched unresisting into the ovens, one step at a time, each step hoping that their captors would be reasonable. It was the ones who resisted who got the clean deaths, the other six million died horribly.

So Jared found himself silently respecting the girls' immediate and appropriate response to the clear and present danger those gang members represented. If you weren't armed yourself, running away, raising the biggest fuss and ruckus you could, was better than meekly accepting rape, torture and possible death and enslavement any day of the week.

No, for slightly built teenage girls without weapons or powers of their own, theirs was pretty much the perfect response, and he could not fault it.

Of course, it would be better to have armed themselves. But now that he thought of it, some of the bulges he'd caught glimpses of in their purses and pockets were probably tasers and pepper spray. Defensive weapons, but about the most a government would let ordinary civilians carry without extensive (and expensive) licensing.

Which was sad, but frequently how things were.

He noted the criminals hadn't had any trouble getting a hold of plenty of offensive weapons in quite an assortment of lethal varieties.

Of course this observation was more or less incidental as no sooner had they appeared than he'd shifted to lion form and was charging even before the lightning-fast reaction time of the girls.

The girls had the best strategy that could be had - if you were unarmed level 1 commoners. But as any D&D player will tell you, the first trick is not to be a level 1 commoner.

Jared played Dungeons and Dragons at levels of optimization that most groups regarded as strictly theoretical. Tossing around hundreds or even thousands of points of damage in a round was more or less expected at their table, and you had to be able to do it in a wide variety of ways, too, as their DMs caused them to face intelligent foes who observed these fights and adapted what creatures they sent to bedevil the party, and so if you fell in a rut or became a one-trick pony pretty soon all of the monsters you faced would be set up to specifically neutralize you.

In setting up his modified version of the D&D online game to run the training simulation on, he'd taken the shortcut of pretty much just copying the adventure and materials needed to recreate the abilities of a very specific character - one who was himself an answer to the self-imposed optimization challenge of: just how powerful can I make a D&D character anyway?

A thought exercise that ended up surprising him by just how over the top he could be while staying strictly within the rules. The character's specific abilities required seven file folders crammed full of papers, each filled with one line descriptions of powers, feats and abilities, along with a reference of where to find the full versions - and all of that was without any time or space spent accounting for his spells, of which he had many as that character was principally a spellcaster.

That character was so over the top that he wrapped around and come out the other side, only to go over the top again.

He'd actually played a trimmed-down version of the character build, only about half his real potential, during a No-Holds-Barred, first-to-epic, anything-printed-for-D20-is-legal campaign, and still had wound up silently nerfing himself and pulling his punches so as not to totally overshadow all of the rest of the massively tweaked game characters at that table, and despite that self-nerfing had still wound up punching far above his weight class.

The most effective of those other players had all been using tricks copied from him, too.

Even the trimmed-down version of that character build had more cheese than a dairy, and Jared probably ought to feel ashamed for playing the fully souped up complete version at its highest level. But he didn't.

No, you'd have to be insane for taking on a death world like this one at any less than your full capacity, especially when he'd probably be fighting Endbringers at some point, and if things held true to form that would be sooner rather than later.

When you were in a situation where your life was on the line, you pull out all of the stops. No sense worrying about 'balance', you unbalance it in your favor as much as you can! Then you unbalance it some more, if at all possible.

No sense nerfing yourself and making things more difficult than they had to be when you were facing those kinds of odds. After all, from his perspective this was all real. It wasn't a game where the challenge made it interesting, but a world full of innocent people to save - and the longer the delay in their being saved, the greater their suffering.

Being a Divine Minion was a beautiful thing granting one the ability to change shape into one or more specific types of animal based on exactly what divine force you were a minion of. This was better than a druid's already powerful signature ability of wildshaping into animals in a variety of ways, such as unlimited uses per day, unlimited duration in animal form, other minor bonuses few knew to care about, and the key to its greatness: allowing you to change shapes as a free action.

Free actions take precisely no time. So in less time that it took to blink he could be a lion and still preserve his ability to move and act in the same round. Since he had other abilities that enabled him to control his appearance, Jared chose a perfectly white lion with a golden crescent moon on its forehead to be thematically appropriate to Sailor Moon.

And the 1,200ft per round movement speed he'd mentioned earlier? That was a mistake. That was for the slimmed down version of this character. The full version had a base land speed of 6,075ft per move action without recourse to spells or magic items. That translated to a little over 1,010ft per second, at which pace he retained the full mobility you'd expect from someone walking, ie, the ability to stop, reverse, turn sharp corners on a dime, dodge obstacles, not step on gum wrappers, etc.

Running, charging and double move actions all multiplied that.

Since average speed for a bullet fired from a 9mm handgun worked out to about 1,100ft per second, while some large caliber rifle rounds traveled at speeds up to and beyond 4,000ft per second, that made him quite literally run faster than a speeding bullet.

And being a magical creature he didn't have to disturb the air with his passage if he didn't want to. So he could *sneak* at those velocities!

On the other hand, opening a door or a window was something that took a move equivalent action, so those really slowed him down, as while he could buy more of those using special abilities, those had limits on uses per day so were not to be wasted on trivial nonsense like taking out mooks. So this wasn't like some of the tricks seen in DC where you could expect super speed to enable someone to tie or untie the shoelaces of an entire stadium crowd, or read every book in a library.

But combat he could do very well.

D&D strongly emphasized tactical combat, and among the most common of problems was getting yourself to an effective position. Only the more time you spent moving the less you could on attacking. Ideally combat types wanted to do no movement at all, just stand there spending all of their time chopping things like energetic blenders, but enemies are rarely so accommodating.

Felines in D&D had a wonderful ability called Pounce that everyone envied or wanted to emulate, because they did not have to make a choice between movement or a full attack - they could do both, darting about to explode in balls of furry violence on their targets.

It turned a charge, basically the standard form of attack everybody used, into something more akin to shooting things with a fang and claw bearing missile.

Popping a spell as a free action, Jared changed his feline charge into something even more devastating, as it would grant him an attack on every creature he passed near on his charge route, as well as four times normal speed. This, while using a psionic feat that allowed him to make as many turns as he liked during a charge, allowed him to plot a course that would take him within range of every gangster who had exited a vehicle and attack them all.

It was a spell he'd never used before for fear of overshadowing everyone further.

On his initial, trimmed-down build he'd rolled damage on each of his claws that worked out to being struck by four .50 cal machinegun bullets, which was less than half the damage he'd been entitled to, and often he'd shorted himself even from that, choosing to reduce it further due to his sheer number of attacks making even that low number overwhelming. Now on his complete build the damage of his lion claws had risen so high it was embarrassing to talk about, but there wasn't a creature in any of the official books that he couldn't one-shot many times over with ease.

In fact, not even the largest train, with the heaviest load, going its maximum speed, on the steepest downhill slope that it could conceivably stay on the tracks, striking a target with every ounce of force, not one erg wasted, could do half as much damage as he did. So you might, with complete accuracy, state that he was more powerful than a locomotive.

Gang members exploded, flying every which way as though fired out of cannons.

Sadly, the ones who had not left their cars were safe from him because of the time waste it would be for him to open those doors. But he did enter a couple of trucks where the back doors were open, and send bodies of gang members flying out through new holes made in the thin metal walls. Where they hit those bodies splashed, every cell in the gangsters having been liquefied by the sheer destructive energy they'd been subjected to, and their bones were so much powder.

Such was the power of the force that launched them there wasn't any structural integrity left in those bodies for their landings to disrupt. But at the speeds at which they traveled even water would act like concrete, so they blew through any inconvenient walls in their paths.

Out of a white panel truck behind their footsoldiers two people had begun to debark that he could only presume to be capes. Both were roughly the size of ogres, being about nine feet tall and heavily overbuilt. One was a guy with an enormous potbelly, and carrying along two nineteenth century cannons left over from the golden age of sail, one under each arm like oversize tonfa. And, if Jared didn't miss his guess, from the belts of ammunition leading from each, someone had rigged those cannons for full auto fire.

The other was a chick so stocky she could have passed for a classic dwarf if not for her height. She even came complete with beard, and was wearing a set of full interlocking plate armor that looked to be about four inches thick, all of it polished up to a mirror shine. Along with this she carried an eight foot tall tower shield of matching thickness and polish, and in the other hand bore a wrecking ball that looked like the real deal, salvaged from some construction company.

Jared's real fury grounded on them.

He hit the armored one first, guessing that target would take more energy to take down that the potbellied one wearing only an open front shirt.

There had been, many years ago in the pre-epic games at Jared's table before they really started cutting loose, a character who had taken 2,347 points of damage in a single attack in a single round. Of course, being that the person struck was a Frenzied Berserker, it did not impair him in the least and he kept on fighting. That was pretty much a Frenzied Berserker's schtick, mere damage cannot take them down until they are good and ready to die, and the rest of the party did manage to heal him before the effect sustaining his life ran out. That wasn't even the worst damage suffered in that fight, as later their enemies had taken even more from having one of their own devices thrown back on them.

But from the moment he first took that damage, through the remainder of that fight, and ever after, they'd taken to referring to him in that moment as, "A loosely connected cloud of Dave molecules."

The armored ogress had only a fraction of a second for her eyes to widen in fear and alarm before the rampaging great cat struck her, whereupon she got to experience an effect very similar to Dave's, except that she exceeded his damage taken many times over. In fact in the movie Ghostbusters, when one character tried to explain to another not to cross the streams, he'd told them, "Try to imagine all life as you know it stopping instantaneously and every molecule in your body exploding at the speed of light."

The damage she received was not that effect. In fact it fell short of it by a wide margin. However the visual she gave as she exploded gave a far better impression of that effect that the real thing would have.

Really having every molecule in your body exploding at the speed of light was kind of boring, by comparison, as it was over too quickly for there to be any visual. You just vanished completely, and that was it. Teleporting looked hardly any different. Anything else was just residue of that explosion.

Now if you were to imagine a slo-mo of that effect, that's pretty much what the armored chick went through, battered on so many sides by so many attacks doing so much damage that it could be debated by physicists whether or not she ought to have briefly achieved fusion before her particles escaped in so many directions that some of her armor would later be discovered as microscopic mineral deposits buried over forty feet underground.

The PRT would be testing the area she died, running it over with radiation detectors, before declaring it safe.

Then all of that kinetic energy he'd struck the woman with came roaring right back into Jared's face, somehow reflected back on him. Fortunately he had taken measures ahead of time as one of his many "just in case" contingencies, and got hit by a Heal spell, erasing all of the damage even as it hit. But that reversal came as an unpleasant surprise. There hadn't even been time for an immediate action to stop it, which meant that came as a part of one of his own actions, not theirs.

One thing about D&D characters is that once you reach high level your skill checks start to give back some amazing results. Often making amazing leaps of intuition just like you'd had weeks to examine and study the evidence, instead of merely a glance. And his various knowledge skills informed him that the armored lady's parahuman ability had been called Reflect, as whatever energy something imparted to her got a reflection of that right back.

Also that she'd had some pretty good regeneration, but he didn't think it was on Wolverine levels, so she was probably toast regardless.

Despite having killed the one cape he had attacks left for the other, so he took them, and once again had no warning as his attack suddenly got reflected back on him by a different power - and he'd already used up his one defense against that.

~Kinetic Control,~ his skills told him, just as Jared's world dissolved in pain.

OoOoO

~... the only way that guy could fire ships cannon as hand weapons without breaking his wrists, to say nothing of doing so on full-auto, would be if he could control the effects of kinetic energy, at least as it affects himself.~ Jared concluded his dying thought as his mind rebooted.

He got up, shouldering aside the massive pile of bricks that had laid on top of him, having been knocked directly away from the cannon guy by his own attack. Since the gangs had driven up behind the crowd when they'd been watching that fire, it was in the partially collapsed ruins of the still burning stadium that Jared returned to a knowledge of himself.

~So cannon guy's power must allow him the redirection of kinetic energy, because that's how he got me. Once more turning my attack back on me, just like the armored chick had. The pair had similar powers, so might have been a group trigger, or possibly they are related.~

The rubble around him was piled deep, and choked with smoke, still-burning embers, and ash. If Jared still needed to breathe, he would have choked long ago. But thankfully that was one weakness he'd found a way around. He'd never needed it before, but just considered it having saved him now proof of one of those, "better to have and not need..." things.

He'd been knocked deep into a collapsed rubble pile, so started clawing his way out.

~Of course, with *superhero* type regeneration having every cell in your body shredded is lethal. But with *D&D* style regeneration all damage you take is nonlethal. The worst it can do is knock you unconscious, and all nonlethal damage is recovered after a night's sleep - which, coincidentally, starts when you are knocked unconscious.~

Since Jared had an elf-only ability reducing his need to sleep to only a single hour, he knew that only a single hour had passed since losing that fight, because that's when his hit points would have been restored to max.

And the stadium fire still raging around him reinforced that, serving as proof that he hadn't been out too long.

~And of course no one went looking for my body, as not only was I knocked into a burning building, but after seeing so many gang members splash as their bodies and bones had been liquefied by my attacks, then seeing me shoot away under that same force, who would have believed that I could live through that? So why bother checking?~

So he was free and clear. The next priority was to check on those girls. After all, they'd saved his life once, he owed them. And perhaps he could return the favor.

Jared burst free of the rubble into the side of a collapsed basement room not completely choked with rubble, and began to very quickly shimmy his way up towards the surface, using blindsight to determine his surroundings as they were completely blocked by smoke.

~Naturally, striking slightly up toward the ogre-sized guy had knocked me on a shallow down angle as I flew away from him. So I should have realized that I'd wake up under some stuff in a collapsed sub-basement.~

And, of course, a burrow speed was one of the few things he'd never bothered to acquire. It was too easy to get a good one with spells, while the permanent forms were all so desperately slow.

No faster than an ordinary person, and how sad was that?

Reaching surface under the destroyed building, the lack of oxygen and withering heat were punishing, or would have been if he'd cared about either. Instead, he whispered a few spells, restoring lost protections, as he resolved to be more cautious in the future, as he didn't have Mr. Cooper's basement set up yet - a secret hospital that his party had set up to revive them in case of something taking them out, with automatic teleport triggers to get them back there.

Mr. Cooper's basement was awesome. They'd needed it practically every fight, and since he was not doing much better here, it was a "must do" to set that back up again.

Jared finally pulled himself free. Not that there was any question of that, he had enough ranks in Escape Artist to wriggle his way out of the grip of Zeus, so staying imprisoned in the mere rubble of a collapsed building was out of the question.

Spotting the firefighters still at work outside, and not desiring to draw their attention as they behaved rather strongly towards people fleeing burning buildings, and while he saluted that behavior in general, he personally had no need or desire for it right now, he turned invisible and darted out to safety, leaping to a good vantage point so he could get an effective view of the lay of the land.

Jared's jump skill had some truly impressive bonuses, such that he could clear more than 1,000ft straight up, so was easily able to leap some of the tallest buildings in the world in a single bound...

... without recourse to his many flight abilities, of course.

So it was a minor hop for him to jump to the top of the tallest building on campus. There he reverted to human form, glad as he did so that it was standard for equipment and worn gear to meld with one's form while in wildshape. He could control that effect when it became a nuisance, but he was glad for it this time as that had spared his new and so far only set of decent clothes from being atomized.

One of the very few things he could do at all resembling what characters like the Flash did with their super speed was to loot the bodies of his foes. It amounted to the auto-loot system of games like Warcraft, so he was carrying plenty of weapons, drugs, and second hand clothes in his enchanted little bag. But he certainly wasn't going to wear what he'd stolen off the gang members. The group he'd faced had worn a uniform of all black kung fu outfits, wrapped with some red cord around places like the chest and forehead.

And Jared would sooner walk around on fire than wear black.

One glance below at the police barricades, one blown up fire truck, and the complete lack of girls he knew among the witnesses being questioned told him the probable story. The gang had managed to withdraw in good order, even taking their vehicles with them. Considering the number of them he'd killed, that meant they had received reinforcements, which meant the probable state of the girls was a bad one, since his Sense Motive skill gave him the hunch the gangsters had been there on a mass kidnapping spree - forced recruitment for their prostitution rings for a lot of girls to cover for one murder.

About this time loads of people would devolve into meaningless angst, taking any excuse but most probably tearing themselves up over not being better, wiser, faster, etc, so they could have prevented the girls' capture.

Then, once they'd done moping about, they'd silently congratulate themselves over how 'deep' and 'meaningful' their pity party had been.

Seriously, as if they didn't have a better use for their time. Some people were so into that self-suffering schtick there were a ton of supposed self-insert stories out there that never got past the inserting character's massive freak-out over being in a different world.

A colossal waste of time, really. Didn't they have any degree of self control? Couldn't they even imagine what to do after showing off how completely they would lose it on finding themselves in a difficult situation?

It was, in his opinion, more than a little pathetic to have so low a threshold, where a tiny little thing like getting stuck in another universe made you lose all your composure.

I mean honestly!

Or they'd freak out over friends being in danger, instead of doing something about it. Well, screw that. Sometimes bad things happened. You could either waste time moping about it while they got worse, or you could do something to fix it. Right now there were girls out there who needed saving. Spending hours fretting over not having known the powers of enemies he'd never met before would just be time wasted when every second counted.

Actions always spoke louder than words, and not acting when your friends needed you was reprehensible, plain and simple.

Still, the enemy gone, no clues...

It was this sort of situation that was the exact reason behind his eagerness to gain the abilities of a D&D character. It was not because of the speed, nice as that was it simply was not as vital to a teleporter like him as it would have been to other people. Nor was it about the preposterous unarmed damage he could inflict, as Warcraft characters were all about combat, and covered preposterous scale damage quite nicely already.

Warcraft had threats of its own that could, had and did sink continents or shatter entire worlds into freefloating clouds of rubble. No, alien space whales were far from unique in their world-destroying habits, and Warcraft characters at their highest levels were expected to take on creatures whose destructive power, though the mechanics of how their abilities worked may differ, was comparable to Endbringers; battling face to face, in life or death struggles, and in the end survive to cast those enemies down in ruin to spare their world further catastrophe.

Nor had he gone to D&D to learn leaping, as Warcraft had already taught him several ways to teleport and fly.

No, it was the sheer versatility that a well-made D&D character could bring to bear on almost any situation. Faced with finding a lost one a Warcraft character was helpless without a quest tip or internet guide to point him the right way.

As a D&D spellcaster, though, the sheer number of spells that existed for that system ensured that pretty much no matter the situation, they had the perfect spell to answer it. And he was a dedicated student of the art of metamagic, the ability to modify spells on the fly to even better serve his purposes.

So he just cast a Discern Location with a minor little tweak so it got him a reading on each of those girls. Finding them all in one location, he sprouted a pair of angelic wings and shot off faster than a speeding bullet.

Yes, he could have teleported. But at this close range it would hardly be any faster to scry and teleport, when with wings out doubling his already impressive land speed those same two rounds let him cross nearly fourteen miles.

So he was doing better than a mile a second while his quarry were driving through downtown, rush hour traffic on one of the last shopping days before Christmas.

It was a wonder he didn't reach their base before them, and he easily could have if he'd known where it was, as he nearly overshot his target while they were stuck in traffic. He noted immediately that there was only one truck, and turning the roof of it transparent to just himself he could easily see inside, that Mina and the girls he'd been so proud of for acting so intelligently were all suspended alive in one great big block of some kind of crystal, like flies in amber or Han Solo in carbonite.

Jared could easily tell they were alive. He was just about to blow apart their captors and rescue them when another possibility crossed his mind.

Mina and the other girls had done everything right, yet still got taken down. And as long as they continued on as low level characters without any special talents or abilities they would continue to be helpless and vulnerable to anyone more powerful.

Since their being level 1 commoners was the problem, that was the first thing to correct.

For someone interested in their long-term welfare there really wasn't any other choice. High level characters lived dangerous lives, that low level companions tended not to survive. So he could either break off their budding friendship in the interest of protecting them, which had always seemed a foul and reprehensible choice, or he could help them go up in level.

And it would be easy, too. The gang toughs and thugs guarding them in that truck were only levels 4 and 5, too low to give any meaningful experience to someone of his caliber. But if it could somehow be arranged for the girls to defeat them... yeah, that would be a decent chunk of xp.

Enough to retrain from commoner to a meaningful class, at least.

~Yes,~ Jared concluded smugly. ~That would do just right.~

He himself would have to hang back and not participate in actual combat, else his help would neutralize any xp the girls would otherwise gain. But nothing prevented him from helping them before combat began, or in between fights for that matter.

Luckily, as remarkable as some of the things Jared could do were, he was still principally a spellcaster, and was something of a specialist at casting spells to make his party members more powerful and capable.

Quickly, he began to establish one of his more peculiar abilities. Thankfully, traffic was slow, so he had the ten minutes he needed, just floating softly above the slow moving truck on silent wings. Thus enabled, he could now cast a single spell and have it affect himself and all five girls.

His group size limits were actually larger, but he had no more allies than that at the moment.

Moreover, with this ability he could load up a small number of spells to go off all at once, taking his party from normal to having some quite significant magical protections in almost no time. Almost like a classic Sailor Moon transformation sequence.

He got some quiet giggling in over that, floating silent and invisible in the air above the truck contemplating a joke only he would know. Then he began to delve into setting up a careful set of powers for each Sailor Scout, approximating those seen in the show.

In any tabletop RPG players can and should expect to be called on from time to time to explain their abilities, name sources, and break down the math behind what they are doing on levels of detail that could frustrate anyone to hear. Yet every detail must be provable to be legal. This led to a habit where, like many experts, veteran players were often eager to explain their tricks in far more detail than anyone else wanted to hear.

Jared was gleeful in setting up a true wonder, tweaking rules and invoking rare abilities in a display of gaming genius that shared a lot in common with someone setting up an excellent fireworks show - in that the wonder of the display contrasted sharply with the level of tedium most would feel if faced with a full explanation of all of the fine detail that went into it.

A true account could be given, and proved on every point, but it would be of interest only to experts, and very few of them would possess the whole range of resource materials he used, as his abilities spanned sources produced by many publishers for the D20 system.

But like with a fireworks display, most could appreciate the wonder of the show without having any understanding of the intricate workings behind its setup.

Jared realized partway into this that what had started out as a joke was swiftly becoming less so, more a reenactment of the real thing. But what was surprising him most was how closely he could get their abilities to mirror the original Scouts.

Okay, spells loaded. Things were now rigged for the girls to go from mere human to clearly superhuman in just a second or two, the moment he activated the effect. He took a few moments to see to his own appearance, choosing to go for an 'anime wizard' style rather than the signature look of Sailor Moon's normal male lead, then he landed on a lightpost overlooking the truck. An Ice Knife spell gave him a projectile, which Spell Thematics gave the appearance of a feather to suit his theme, and he then used metamagic to enchant it with the spell needed.

All that was left was to choose an appropriate poem.

A slash of his arm flung the ice knife out in an attack, passing through the roof of the truck and shattering the crystal which held Mina and her friends bound. Having attacked canceled out his invisibility. The maidens looked up to see him through the rent in the roof and the gang member at the driver's seat of the truck saw an obvious cape attack on them and began to swerve right as Jared tossed off another Time Stop, this time including the girls so they could see and move while everything else hung still in an apparently endless moment.

There, with the truck tilted in mid-calamity, the man in brilliant robes looked down on those maiden faces with kindness in his eyes and cried out with passion, his voice suited to make him a fortune as a Hollywood star or radio announcer.

"When things go wrong, as they sometimes will,  
When the road you're trudging seems all uphill,  
When funds are low, and the debts are high,  
And you want to smile, but you have to sigh,  
When care is pressing you down a bit,  
Rest if you must, but don't you quit.

"Life is queer with its twists and turns,  
As every one of us sometimes learns,  
And many a failure turns about,  
When he might have won if he'd stuck it out.  
Don't give up, though the pace seems slow -  
You may succeed with another blow.

"Often the goal is nearer than  
It seems to a faint and faltering man;  
Often the struggler has given up  
When he might have captured the victor's cup,  
And he learned too late, when the night slipped down,  
How close he was to the golden crown.

"Success is failure turned inside out -  
The silver tint of the clouds of doubt,  
And you can never tell how close you are -  
It may be near when it seems afar;  
So stick to the fight when you're hardest hit -  
It's when things seem worst that you mustn't quit."

Then with a dramatic slash of his cape he cried out, saying, "And now! Sailor Scouts! Transform!"

Surges of energy hit all five girls, and they got lifted up and began to swirl through the air as force fields created armor and shields, while powerful weapons became available in the form of various elemental attacks.

Jared took the same opportunity to hit them with the emotion of Hope.

Landing in costume, the girls all jumped free of the swerving truck a second before it crashed into the side of a building, and gang members started spilling out its doors.

Music began to play, which fans of the series would naturally recognize.

OoOoO

Author's Notes:

Frankly, as far as Big Bads go, if it ever came to a conflict between Warcraft's Demons of the Twisting Nether and Worm's giant, mutant, alien, multidimensional space whales it wouldn't even be a contest, as the space whales' primary defense is hiding their vulnerable bits behind dimensional boundaries, but demons of the twisting nether sense and navigate across dimensions just fine - so ought to have the same ability to kill space whales that Foil, the heroine who possesses the anti-space-whale dandruff, does.

Having infinite numbers so they can assault across countless dimensions simultaneously also helps out the demon's case.

While on the other claw, the space whales have no defense against the kind of mind mojo that demons of the twisting nether routinely fling around. They can corrupt and subvert critters that know about telepathy and have defenses against it that space whales do not.

So as far as "world ending creatures of unimaginable power" go, space whales actually rank fairly low on the scale for such things.

Oh, and the poem "Don't Quit" is by an anonymous author, so no copyright restrictions apply. It is by definition public use.


	7. Chapter 7

Stepping on Worm  
Chapter Seven

by Skysaber  
aka Perfect Lionheart

OoOoO

Mina Lovejoy was a blue-eyed blonde sixteen year old with a perky personality and an upbeat, can-do attitude, who would cheerfully lay down her life for her friends.

And this was the worst day in her life.

It had started out so well, too! Any day spent with her friends was a good one, she was certain they were the best thing ever to happen to her. They'd all been through rough times together, and each time resolved their problems by growing ever closer, and she wouldn't trade them for anything.

Not even for the most delectable boy on the planet.

So it was a good thing Heartbreaker was in this country, and the government had passed dozens of laws in favor of polygamy, giving it all of the protections of any other alternative lifestyle in order to please him, because it was just possible they'd found that boy.

And a superpower for making clothes? How could things get any better than that?! Not only did she love clothes as much as the next teenage girl, but they were something that you could sell to support a family on! They could have a shop selling custom fashions of her own design! And unlike most people with superpowers like blasting things or teleporting, they would not be asking a man who made clothes for a living to fight Endbringers!

Mina had no desire to be a widow before she was eighteen. She'd seen the numbers and could do math, capes attending Endbringer fights had a distressing tendency not to come home. They lost almost a quarter of those capes attending, so if she had a husband who participated in Endbringer battles, at four of those a year, she'd be amazingly lucky to keep him all of two years - which wasn't anywhere near enough!

In a world as topsy-turvy as this one, with crazy super powers and monsters able to sink Kyushu, a girl wanted all of the stability she could get!

And sixteen wasn't too early to start. She could even be married with a little parental consent! Something she felt sure she could talk her mom and dad into once it could be shown what a bread-winner power the boy had. Talk about lucky!

Okay, Mina even admitted to herself that she was a little boy crazy, but who could blame her? There were over a dozen separate gangs in Brockton Bay, each one of them recruiting heavily among the boys her age, and with the fighting going on all over there was a serious disparity of numbers cropping up between boys and girls!

There was shooting going on all over. In some places it was gangs, other places whole countries were at war as old alliances had broken up in a free-for-all over resources, and in still other places countries had broken down entirely and it was warlords fighting. Since males always died in great numbers during conflict, they were facing a serious shortage!

That was why Mina could hardly believe her luck when she'd found that cute college student sleeping in the burning stadium!

As someone who was careful to be alert to threats around her at all times, she knew how to recognize every gang sign, color or tattoo in Brockton Bay, even for the defunct gangs, and with him lying there wearing only a towel (which she would never admit to having lifted the corner of to peek under, except in some whispered conversations she was dearly looking forward to with her friends) under some blankets it had been easy to tell he had no gang affiliation markings of any kind.

Girls of all sorts spent hours complaining over how rare that was. Any boy who had even halfway reasonable muscles was always getting press-ganged by one side or another. And the lifespan of any gang member was distressingly short. So it was no use to a girl to go searching for a permanent relationship there.

And this boy had not been merely halfway reasonable. No, that was pure, Olympic grade musculature on prime quality beefcake normally seen only on the cover of romance novels!

As she well knew.

Anyway, her relationship with her friends was so strong the only thing that could make it better was to find the right boy to plug in, to where they could all spend the rest of their lives together, and not only does she find one, not only is he the most handsome boy she's ever met, built like a god, and nice to boot, but he had a super power he could use to support them all!

Mina was more than willing to declare that a match made in heaven and trot out a preacher. Luck didn't deliver that kind of find twice! *AND* with this boy she could even go as extravagant as she'd ever wanted on the wedding clothes!

A bit of extravagance here or there made up for a lot of scrimping to get by. She and her friends had been through some rough times, but at last it was looking like they'd been getting over the bad patches. Christmas this year wasn't looking to be as meager as the one before. Oh, sure, there were a lot of homemade gifts under the tree, and a lot of the decorations had been homemade too, but that had actually become part of the fun of it, working together to make things for each other had somehow become a big part of the fun of the holiday.

Oh, sure, there weren't a great many surprises under the tree for anybody, but the laughs and games they'd had using sewing needles and string to link popcorn together, cutting and folding paper decorations, and just stretching the budget so everyone had more had made the whole thing more meaningful for everyone.

They'd had a rough couple of years together. First it had been parahumans making living in Tokyo so dangerous with their fights. Then when Leviathan sank Kyushu the housing market prices skyrocketed, forcing them all to leave, taking ship as refugees to America.

Faced with the prospect of scattering across the globe, possibly never to see each other again, had actually brought them closer, as each made decisions, giving up other possibilities in order to stay together.

Amy, as the best student among them, had been offered a place at a prestigious school in Germany, but had chosen to stay with them instead - fortunately for her, as it turned out, as Germany was now thick with Nazis.

At least Mina had lived for a year in England, so had been able to play something like tour guide for all of her friends. It wasn't like the two great English-speaking nations were as different as they sometimes liked to pretend.

Then they'd been resettled in Brockton Bay, which had crushed a lot of hopes as it became plain this was not the best part of the United States. Still, they'd made the best of it, even when that meant them all taking serious lessons in martial arts from Rae's grandfather in order to protect themselves from the ridiculous number of gangs.

There again, sticking together they had worked things out.

Mina wouldn't trade her friends for anybody. In fact when all of those laws got passed establishing polygamy as legal (mostly to clear away any problems Heartbreaker had working with the government, since he was already doing it before he began to save the country) they'd all agreed to marry the same fellow, if they could find the right one.

Mina felt certain she'd found the right one today.

She could just feel it. He was certainly handsome enough, making her glad she had a bunch of friends close enough to share him with, as guys that good looking aren't easily caught, so having a lot of extra help was welcome.

Okay, so her mind kept circling around the good parts of today, but considering what had happened after, who could blame her?

She'd picked up the boy's backpack and helped him out of the burning stadium to introduce to her friends. Everything had been going swimmingly even up to Serena's little invitation to get him over to her house!

That had been a little play on their part, as they all lived in the same building. Having been forced to move twice since they got there to avoid forced gang recruitment, they'd finally found a place all scrunched together in the top of an apartment complex filled with Jews. Seeing as how the Jewish community had all banded together after repeated assaults by the gangs, it was the closest to safety they could get in this town.

The Jews in their building had only one gun between them, but they set up guard rotations and made sure the gangs knew they had it and would use it, passing it between them so that every shift was armed.

Rae had joked that if their Jewish neighbors got any more clannish and defensive they'd all be forced to attend synagogue and learn Hebrew - but if that was the price, Rae had told them all she'd rather pay it than move again.

That was no small admission, as Rae had once been a Shinto shrine maiden. But then she had been feeling rather burned by her old religion since the Japanese government had seized her family shrine.

And there she was distracting herself again, because the next part of Mina's day was where the serious misery started, because that's when the gangs had showed up. And you did not have to live in Brockton Bay more than a day to know that gangs had ruined everything.

They'd lost the boy. That had been heart-wrenchingly awful, but there had been too many close shaves just barely escaping the gangs before (who somehow always wanted more prostitutes, sometimes it was awful being pretty in this world) to wait around when those wearing gang signs showed up. So they'd sprinted for all they were worth, losing sight of the perfect boy in the process!

As if that hadn't been bad enough, the gang just wouldn't let up!

Mina and her friends had been on the run from anything gang related for over two years now, ever since they'd come to Brockton Bay. They'd even been captured before, but managed to escape before anything bad had happened thanks to some lock picking lessons and the fact that each girl now held concealed on her body at least two different lockpicks in two different locations - and the fact that gangs kept underestimating them.

But that had all come to a stop today.

Before, the rule that had always let them win was Mina and her friends had only ever been targets of opportunity. Sure, they were pretty, and the gangs wanted pretty girls for their brothels, but being just another pretty face wasn't worthy of any special attention when one would serve as well as another. So they'd always been able to get by on making it too difficult to catch them to be worth any gang's bother.

But not today.

Today the Crimson Dragon gang just had to decide that any girl seen on the site of that burning stadium had to be captured, for what reason Mina couldn't tell at first, but they'd caught all of the easy ones, then turned on Mina's little group with a determination that just wouldn't let up!

They'd chased them around campus, used cars to get ahead of them, raided the security office before Mina's little group could get there, and hounded them like rodeo cowboys going after a particularly skittish calf!

And of course there had not been a cop to be seen anywhere.

Finally, when Amy got too tired to run anymore, they'd holed up in a big building, racing up to the top floor to all barricade themselves in some pencil-pusher's office, throwing all of the furniture they could find over the entrance and determined to fight it out and sell their lives dearly, the gang had just thrown some kind of tinkertech grenade in the window!

That had frozen them all in a big ball of crystallized goop, giving the gang members at the door all the time they needed to break past their barricade without having to take a mix of pepper spray and collapsible batons to their faces doing so.

It was enough to make one cry.

What's worse was the goop didn't knock them out, so they'd been fully conscious of their defeat and all of the horrible things lying ahead as the gang members dug them out of that office and carried them down to a waiting truck.

Mina had blacked out for a few seconds during that, wanting so desperately to stop the bad guys and protect her friends that she woke up concerned that she'd given herself a brain aneurysm due to the funny feeling in her head. It was is the universe was mocking her, promising that she could do something, only when she tried, nothing!

As they'd been carried out, at least she'd heard the reason. She'd overheard something their captors said about getting a tip that a certain cape they wanted to find had been there, the Christmas Elf if you could believe them. So to be sure of catching her, they hadn't wanted to let anything female escape.

The crystal they were trapped in didn't even allow her to shed tears as they got loaded into the truck. Then followed a miserable drive that seemed to take forever.

But, to her wide-eyed astonishment, the roof suddenly caved in under the force of a feather (that HAD to be some sort of parahuman ability!) simultaneously smashing the goop crystal and setting them free. Looking up, Mina saw the boy she'd thought she'd lost in the emergency, standing on a lightpost above the suddenly swerving truck.

That was when she knew everything was going to be alright.

Hope filled her breast, even as energy filled her body. The symbol of Venus flared into existence on her forehead, and ribbons of energy crawled all along her form, snapping into force fields with multiple protective effects, and suddenly she felt smarter and faster and more beautiful than ever before!

Leaping more than thirty feet to land free of the crashing truck was easy, and Mina turned, a small part of her mind conscious of the force fields around them and reinforcing those to be even stronger and tougher than before, and called up a form of energy she'd never knew she had access to before.

"Venus Crescent Beam, Smash!"

Pointing at a thug rushing towards her armed with a length of chain, she cried aloud the attack's name, and the orange laser that flashed forth from her finger subsequently burned completely through the man, vaporizing his entire body a moment later so all that was left of him was a thin trail of sparkling dust.

Sheltered mentally from the shock at what she'd done, and no longer under threat, all Mina cared about was leaping up to tackle their rescuer off of his lamppost so she could properly thank him for the rescue!

OoOoO

This had officially become the worst day in Amy's young life.

It had started out one of the best, too. While she did not personally care for volleyball, by attending practice she could excuse herself early and hang out at the stadium computer lab, which was far superior to either the one in her High School, or the town library.

And then Mina had found what seemed like the perfect boy. Amy had witnessed him use his power to clothe himself just after being brought out of the burning building wearing just a towel, and if those clothes were real and permanent, then he could support a family doing that. More, if the banks collapsed, as it looked like they might despite the Protectorate's best efforts, then in a barter economy clothing still retained value, and could be traded for other necessities like food and rent.

And barter was a serious concern for her, as with all the peace and organization the civilized world had lost already, sometimes a smart girl had to pause and wonder where or if it would all stop unraveling.

Amy Anderson was a lightly built girl with blue hair and blue eyes, which ought to stand out more than it did, but in a world where superpowers had appeared it actually wasn't all that unusual, just slightly exotic.

Amy was also a genius and the best student in Japan. This wasn't hyperbole, or a boast, she had the test scores and pride of place on the official ranking charts to prove it. She had ranked as number one in the nation for years before being forced to leave. And since it was her love of study and learning that drove her, she hadn't slacked since arriving in the US.

However, she wasn't a gifted athlete. It took her waaay more time and effort than other people to reach the same level of physical development. Even with the best motivation in the world, she still couldn't run as fast as her friends, which meant they had to run slower to avoid leaving her behind, which multiplied the danger for everyone.

In the martial arts Rae's grandfather insisted they all study, Amy stuck primarily to the soft forms, where she could outthink an opponent rather than overpower them, because she would never have the kind of strength most people could develop fairly easily.

Thanks to this, she knew she could never survive on her brawn if the world descended to chaos and anarchy.

Which concerned her deeply, because it was unraveling. Even here in good ol' the US of A, food was spiced with salt and onions, everything else was in short supply.

Some things, like mustard and sugar, existed in decent amounts and more could be grown. They just hadn't gotten domestic production up to where the supply met the demand so they were common again. But at least she could comfort herself they were working on it.

Basically, in far too many cases, if it had been cheaper to import back when peace and safety had been the norm around the globe, the US didn't have anywhere near enough domestic production to meet demand. And correcting enough of that to ensure survival had kept even Heartbreaker's cadre busy without allowing any spare time for luxuries.

Other things had never grown well in North America, and so existed only as fond memories anymore: most of the spices the Western diet had gotten used to, like cinnamon, nutmeg, ginger and so on simply weren't available. Good luck finding any anywhere, even the rich and powerful could not put those on their tables. Coffee, tea, chocolate and pepper fell in that category, as did fruits like bananas, pineapples, coconuts, and mangos.

Yes, ordinary table pepper that everyone took for so basic a staple that countless places just put it out in shakers on every table, or gave away in packets for their customers to use for free, was not available anymore. You could not find it, or buy it, for love or money.

The shipping did not exist to move even common comforts anymore, so they became rare treasures instead. And not a few treasure troves of packets stashed in the backs of kitchen drawers as leftovers from takeout bags had gotten pulled out and sold for small fortunes.

For the middle ground, there were a bunch of herbs that by and large came already mixed in to things so common people had forgotten how to use by themselves, like rosemary and thyme, oregano and so on. So if you wanted to eat Italian you were set. But for a girl raised in Japan, well, Japanese cooking, as well as Chinese, Thai, Vietnamese, and others originating in Asia used spices and things best grown in Asia, so were almost never found anymore. Certainly not on their poor budget.

Even things that *were* common enough to be available, were not available year round anymore; seasonal fruits like apples, cherries, oranges, and so on. The country grew them, grew them in large amounts even. But they could only be had fresh during the fall, when those trees grew crops to harvest.

The rest of the year it was canned or preserved fruit, or none at all.

Past availability was all due to a handy trick taking advantage of the fact that winter in the northern hemisphere was summer in the southern. So their fall was northern spring, and vice versa. That meant that formerly big produce companies could arrange to import fresh fruit during the northern spring from the southern hemisphere's fall harvest, and vice versa, giving both markets access to two crops each year. Then the produce companies arranged with farmers for certain of them to grow slightly different varieties of those important fruits, some crops maturing early, others late, to give the illusion of year-round availability.

But that sort of thing didn't work without access to both hemispheres and a lot of planning.

The planning Heartbreaker's team could do, especially with Teacher's cadre of Thinkers. The multi-hemisphere access, however, was not possible, as lately it appeared that whatever international trade hadn't dried up for lack of oil had become prey for the suddenly plentiful pirates cropping up everywhere.

Brockton Bay didn't have a problem with pirates itself, being so far north as to make that inconvenient, especially with fuel costs so high, but the entire coast of Florida did. In fact, the entire coast of the Gulf of Mexico got irregularly subjected to raids, as it seemed the entire Caribbean had fallen back onto its roots of piracy, and took any target of opportunity.

That hurt those areas more than it might, because fighting of any kind was bad in this world as medicine had taken a huge dive in availability. No easy access to the far east meant no opium as that was a far eastern product, and with the collapse of the oil producing states that meant everyone else suddenly had to make do on much less oil than they'd like or were used to. So beltlines were tightening everywhere, and one of the major industries struck by that was medicine.

Less oil made for a smaller petrochemical industry, which then turned far fewer raw materials over to the pharmaceutical industry, so doctors found drugs of all kinds were suddenly in short supply. Much shorter than anyone wanted them to be, so lifesaving medicines were given priority in the production cycle, and everything else took a back seat.

Not much oil also made for fewer plastics. So suddenly 'cheap and disposable' products were not so cheap or disposable anymore. That had struck everywhere from grocery store bags to ladies' cosmetics.

Those two facts, not a lot of medicine, and not a lot of plastic to spare, had also dealt a one-two punch to the culture of recreational sex, as from out of nowhere condoms and birth control pills went from nigh-universal availability to a fond memory. Survival came first, and since lifesaving drugs and important industrial uses for plastic held priority, people suddenly had to face very the real risk of getting pregnant.

'No consequence' sex stopped being so fun after the first 'accidents' happened; nor were abortions high on anyone's list of lifesaving procedures, so had minimal access to even basic drugs. Most of those clinics closed outright due to lack of the proper chemicals to do their job. Many others got closed by cops for using illegal street drugs in their procedures.

As her mother was a doctor, Amy had heard plenty of horror stories about that one, more than she'd even admit to her friends. Tales of girls killed by irregular doses was one of the milder ones. So there had been something of a population boom the past twenty or so years as the repercussions of the reduced oil supply hit.

After the first couple of million girls got pregnant, far too many to irresponsible guys who vanished on them, most of the rest slammed their legs together, once again making the "will he make a good husband and father" and, "will he stick around" qualifiers far more important than having good abs or a nice car.

"Marriage first" was making a huge resurgence in the culture in consequence, as women wanted some stability in return for the risk they were taking.

Which, in Amy and her mother's opinion, was frankly a good thing.

As a doctor's daughter Amy had seen and heard too much of the bloody, broken evidence, of ruined lives and tortured bodies, showing the hidden shame and high costs behind the so-called "free" sex culture to be at all fond of it.

One thing she could be certain of, was that if there was anything sex was not, it was the carefree, casual, meaningless fun the media so often portrayed it as. Her mother had seen too much suffering in her medical career to say otherwise. There was a reason that rape was often called "Soul Murder", where victims so often reported they felt that part of themselves had died, and they often required decades to recover, whereas mere cases of physical assault did not - even when the physical assault resulted in much more severe injuries.

With the 'free sex' movement dead and buried under a wave of diapers, no coffee, tea or chocolate; sugar in too short a supply and the various food substitutes and artificial flavorings all relying on that same much-reduced petrochemical industry that could no longer keep up full supply of lifegiving medicines, luxury imports of wine and so on basically nonexistent so variety plummeted even on things that were available, and tourism deader than a doornail as nobody could afford the fuel for nonessential long distance travel, it should come as no surprise to anyone that the discontent level of the average North American pleasure seeker was at an all-time high as that crossed far too many of their common amusements off the list.

With this came the totally expected rise in crime and illegal drug use, naturally. Because as Amy and her friends had been observing far too closely for far too long now, the world was full of creeps with entitlement mentalities that, if they could not get what they wanted the easy way by asking, would take it any way they had to, including by force.

It did not help that many of those people had never considered that mindless sex with whatever caught their eye was not a natural right bestowed on them by the universe, but rather an expensive hobby that took an extremely complex and detailed infrastructure to avoid the natural consequences of.

And that infrastructure had weakened to where it simply wasn't up to supporting that load anymore.

Really, only the fact that nearly everyone was aware that it could get much, much worse if power and running water failed kept that discontent from exploding into rioting everywhere.

Also it was well known Heartbreaker had no sympathy for towns breaking down the precious infrastructure he was sacrificing his own debauchery time to fix. His Tinkers and Thinkers had all they could do dealing with the continual string of emergencies, holding what they already had together so it didn't go sliding apart into something worse. So he'd happily wall entire towns in and napalm the lot if they got too troublesome.

Nor was he the only one of the Protectorate's leaders to be concerned about.

As Amy knew from what her mother passed on, Accord was a monster. His planning was that of a statistician or an accountant, not a humanitarian. He had already judged the cost in medicines of keeping certain patients alive to be not worth the benefit to society, so had, with cold, calculated precision, ordered entire swaths of people euthanized. Anyone with diseases he considered too expensive to treat. So certain diagnoses now meant death.

Since it was well documented in the medical literature that homosexual sex was a particularly effective vector in communicating certain diseases, notably several of the most virulent strains of VD (ones that always before had been treated with the newest, best and most effective antibiotics because those were the only ones that would work, but that now Accord deemed far too costly in terms of lives saved for medicines spent to keep at bay) he'd ordered enough executions that hit people in that particular subculture that they now hid from him as if he were the devil, convinced he was out to get them. But the decision was not made with any malice, just the cold, hard precision of a machine.

He'd never targeted homosexuals. Many of them just happened to have diseases he felt it cost effective to eradicate. He may not even have noticed that one group felt this blow more than others. Who died was entirely incidental to him. He didn't care about their habits or beliefs, those didn't concern him at all. His only care was that of an accountant slashing expenses to make way for more profitable ventures. One might as well ask what the feelings of a lawnmower were as it chopped grass. There was a job to be done. That's all.

Of course, Amy felt sure the grass held a very different view on their relationship.

Due to this and other acts it was now well known that Accord had all of the tender feelings of a railroad spike. And fear of him and what disease he'd deem unsuitable for treatment next, along with the lack of condoms to prevent their spread, had done more to dry up the free sex culture than even the pregnancies.

Through her mother and her mother's coworkers Amy had the inside track to know that Accord's vision of a perfect world functioned a great deal along the lines of an ant hive: every creature had a specific purpose, and they either filled that purpose and contributed more to the state than their upkeep costs required, or they got euthanized.

And he was brutally Darwinian in his principles. Survival of the fittest applied with a ruthless lack of conscience. Even most who followed evolution would be appalled at how closely he adhered to their principles, following rules most of them either ignored or downplayed. Because to him the disabled, elderly, homeless, along with those with birth defects or incurable diseases, existed only to be eliminated.

They were not the fittest, therefore their destruction was mandated by evolution.

That was exactly the same logic and reasoning behind every non-Jewish death in the Nazi extermination camps of WWII. And the USA was quite fortunate in that Heartbreaker's crew were still grappling with so many Gordian knots in trying to keep things running they lacked the control needed to implement that aspect of his plans on a wide scale.

And the survivors of these policies repeated over and over to themselves the mantra that: this was still the *nice* place to live, that everywhere else on the planet was worse.

For all of his supposed brilliance making plans, Amy did not think Accord was the right sort of person to be trusted to save society, as civilization required a high level of cooperation - cooperation that was impossible with people who rightly feared you might decide to wipe them all out to save yourself a few percentage points on a budget.

So she did not think that Heartbreaker or the Protectorate were going the right way in trying to save the country. Other than them, however, no one with any influence really seemed to be trying, and that truly concerned her, because that meant everything was being risked on a plan that she didn't think could work.

So if Accord couldn't do it, and others wouldn't try, she set herself the task of seeing whether society could be saved - only on seeing everything involved she'd decided it was enough if she could create a pocket of stability for she and her friends to enjoy.

Amy knew she was brilliant. Two countries on two continents along with some of the most rigorous educational standards of the world agreed with her. Each year in Japan someone would challenge those test results with claims of parahuman cheating, so each year Japan put its top one hundred scoring students through medical exams to check. But whatever part of the brain controlled parahuman abilities wasn't active in Amy. It was just her pure, native born intelligence, paired with exceptional study habits.

So Amy was easily as smart as some low-level Thinkers, and generally so, not just in one specific area like parahuman abilities provided. But despite that, even she was finding the task daunting.

The US school system had given up on trying to challenge her, just leaving her alone to perform self-study. So she'd decided to use that brilliance to a more rewarding purpose than test scores, and begun to pry at the problem of how to save things, or at least spare her and her friends as much misery as possible if civilization should collapse.

It had been her idea to move into a Jewish community and out of the gang-tagged Asian areas of the town where gang recruitment was high, and verging on becoming universal.

Little things like that worked fine; small, temporary measures to help out a bit, but any time she faced any one of the bigger problems, like saving something larger than a small tribe, the more difficulties and frustration she encountered. She was almost convinced it was an unsolvable problem, except their very lives were at stake so she *had* to solve it! She MUST! For all her friends' sake.

Amy was a genius, an excellent student, naturally gifted in research and study, yet even her intelligence needed some help. She needed information, real facts on what was going on - which the media did its best to disguise, and government information controls did their best to hide so nobody would see how bad the big picture truly was.

So it truly frustrated her that she spent most of her time, not on solving the problem itself, but on prying the needed information free of the cold grasp of those who didn't want to give it up! In consequence, she had, completely against her own will, become something of an expert hacker just to get at the data she needed to know.

Her smartphone, which was a better model than they could strictly afford, was overclocked and outfitted with carefully selected aftermarket add-ons to increase performance, many of which were not even strictly legal, and was tricked out in so many ways she sometimes forgot the fact that it was also a phone. But she used it mostly as her mobile research hub, a place to store all of her plans and data, as well as many of the programs she'd written herself to help find and manage it.

After they had gotten stuck in crystal goop from a tinkertech grenade in the college bursar's office, thugs had been chipping the block free to move them when one of the gangsters found her phone, dropped in the explosion, and fiddled with it, searching for naked selfies. Only when he found none (Amy wasn't that kind of girl) the man destroyed her phone in an expression of anger.

Seeing countless hours of research data and programming effort lost, Amy understandably blacked out for a moment there.

When she came to it was in the back of a nondescript truck filled with those gang members, and after a miserable drive, to her surprise the roof got blown in and the crystal imprisoning them smashed by... a feather, of all things?

That had to be a parahuman power.

Only she didn't have long to contemplate that, as at that moment the symbol of Mercury flashed into existence on her forehead, and Mina's boyfriend was standing on a light pole giving a speech to encourage them, and as soon as that was over, a surge of power ran through her unlike anything she'd ever felt before.

Suddenly she was not just smart, but smarter than ever! As well as dexterous and pretty in a way she'd never dared hope to achieve, and with enough athletic ability she was jumping out of the doomed truck, making leaps of thirty feet as easily as she'd taken single steps before, not to mention wearing some sort of costume unlike anything she'd seen, outside of figure skaters or super heroines that is.

After making the very small intuitive leap to realize that's what she'd become, Amy found instincts guiding her to power up a ball of something cold and fling it toward her enemies, even telling her the words she should shout as part of the attack.

"Mercury Bubbles, Blast!"

A tiny ball of blue/white cold hit her target, a man who'd been trying to bring a gun to bear on her, simultaneously freezing him solid, as well as shrouding the whole area in mist that she intuitively understood she and her friends could somehow see through, and would slow down and hinder any of their enemies caught within like they were moving underwater.

Suddenly this day wasn't looking so bad after all!

Hope filled Amy's breast, and she knew everything was going to be alright. Already, she was having great ideas on how to rebuild her phone better than ever!

OoOoO

Geoff cursed when the truck carrying their valuable cargo suddenly got attacked by a cape and swerved.

Sharply barking an order for the driver of the van he was in to pull over, he decided "screw it!" and slid open the wide side door anyway, as traffic was not going to endanger him, and it was definitely not worth the half hour it would take to park the van in this mess.

Geoff had no way of knowing that in another life he'd have powers only on loan from Teacher, used to gain mastery over tech left behind by another Tinker, and leading a group called the Dragonslayers.

The man he was now would have scoffed at that. Here he'd never met Teacher, nor did he care to. Here he was Cannonade, who'd been given a Brute 9 classification by the PRT, authorizing them to use inter city missiles against him in case of conflict.

It wouldn't help them. His kinetic control was such that neither shrapnel, nor the blasts themselves, from those same inter city missiles would do ought to him. So when he walked on the streets of Brockton Bay the PRT went and hid, to avoid any confrontations.

A car struck Geoff and he deftly redirected that energy under precise control to aid him in getting his large bulk out of a van too small to carry him comfortably, pull out his cannon likewise, mount both them and their backpack full of ammo on him lightning fast, and leap to the top of a convenient, low-lying building.

Cannonade could be struck by a bullet and not only take no harm, but use the energy of that to assemble a box of loose parts he'd been holding into a functional watch. He'd even done that once on a bet, after reading the manual a few times to get an idea of how a watch ought to be assembled, and several false starts before getting it right. In combat, every time something struck him, he'd use that to move himself more swiftly or empower his own attacks. Or just reflect it back on the attacker, like that stupid speedster from earlier.

Cannonade had fought Leviathan to a standstill before, neither one able to hurt the other.

The truck he'd been watching had swerved and hit a building before he got lucky and got hit, using that energy to get out and armed, up to a useful vantage point. By the time he was looking down the truck's roof had been torn open, the power-nullifying crystal left over from the containment grenade they'd used to catch the group of girls who were probable capes was gone, and a whole new bunch of capes had appeared on scene.

None of them were the Christmas Elf, so this whole operation was Fubar anyway.

The girls wore matching costumes: a white one-piece with short skirt, a bow across the chest area, elbow length gloves and matching footwear, with a shoulder flap he'd only ever seen on sailors before, and ornate domino-style masks over their upper faces.

They were also color-coded.

Before Geoff had even landed on the rooftop he'd selected to use the one in blue had cupped her hands and thrown out a ball of blue-white energy, shouting, "Mercury Bubbles, Blast!" and suddenly that whole area surrounding the truck for most of a block radius was cut off from sight as thoroughly as though it was filled with packing foam peanuts.

As an expert on kinetic energy, he could also tell that it must have some secondary effect on motion, as there followed none of the expected crashing noises from blinded traffic.

Then the cloud flashed a brilliant orange that made him think of a refracted laser.

Cannonade didn't recognize the group, but a group they clearly were. No evidence of the 'jeans and hoodie' look of makeshift costumes, either. This set was professionally done, which meant backers, which meant training, so he had to take this fight seriously.

OoOoO

Author's Notes:

Yes, villains remain villains, even if they do succeed at putting themselves in charge. Being in government does not automatically make you a saint. Funny that. Someone should tell Hitler, quick!

Also, lots of people are willing to explore natural disasters in film or story. Apocalypses are actually quite popular. But almost nobody puts forth any plan for dealing with those other than the most common approach of, "I'd arm myself and go hunting supplies from people who were better prepared than I am."

Well, Amy is a smart girl, looking ahead in an unstable society, wondering how she might get along. And she is not physically adept, so can't count on the might of her musculature to save her.

So the route of being Rambo is closed to her, as she is not going to out-violence all of the violent types out there, and rather than face being an extra in a Conan movie she is trying to think her way through possible solutions - all of them made worse by her being aware of the fact that, during any collapse, most people are going to arm themselves and go hunting anyone who has supplies. So if she tries to farm, someone is going to shoot her and take her stuff. If she tries to weave to make cloth, someone is going to kill her and take her stuff, and frankly if she has anything, the whole world is going to be willing to kill her to take it because they didn't plan and have nothing - and their only survival strategy is to be thieves.

So what do you do?


	8. Chapter 8

Stepping on Worm  
Chapter Eight

by Skysaber  
aka Perfect Lionheart

OoOoO

"GAWK!"

Jared had been admiring Sailor Jupiter, bullets bouncing off her pretty chest where she had leapt in between a gangster with an assault rifle and a small family with kids who'd cried out in fear in the fog, and instantly been targeted by the blind thug who could see nothing in the mist, so aimed at the first noise that screamed 'victim' to his senses.

A spell he'd cast gave the Sailor Scouts equivalent armor protection to troopers in high-tech powered armor. So she was in no danger, but he was admiring the bravery of it when suddenly he got tackled off his lofty perch, onto his back on the ground twenty feet below.

Jared was wondering why any number of combat abilities hadn't kicked in automatically in response to that when he looked up at who had him pinned and met the warm blue eyes of Sailor Venus, who was giving him a bedroom gaze.

"Hi!" she said perkily.

'Let's belong to each other,' said her looks.

'Ok!' cried his heart eagerly, before his brain could get anywhere near his voice box. And with that she just curled up on his chest and made herself comfortable, with every intention of staying for a while. If she was a kitten she would have begun purring.

He barely resisted the urge to scratch her ears, and went for stroking her long blonde hair instead, leaving off each stroke about halfway down her back because otherwise her hair would have carried his hand clear down to touching her bottom.

Which she might have agreed to, but he wasn't ready for yet. One doesn't go leaping to the end of a mystery novel. It's the journey.

Besides, he was bound by the Law of Chastity, which meant nothing sexual until the wedding rings were on.

Which, given how comfortable she'd made herself, might be this afternoon.

This made for an oddly domestic cuddle to be held in the middle of a street during a firefight, but neither of them were complaining. Jared, because he knew of these girls long before he'd made the trip to this universe, and Venus because she'd already committed to making this relationship work with the full force of her bubbly personality.

And he was ok with that. More than ok, actually, it was what he wanted too; and sensing that she just snuggled deeper and made pleased sounding noises.

Yeah, he was going to have to find a jeweler, as rings would be needed soon.

As if she was telepathic, Venus slipped her arms around him and got possessive.

Yeah. Jeweler. Soon.

In fact, after casting a quick Augury to know for certain whether or not he was making a mistake (and might he just say, having God tell you "Yes, this is going to work, and lead to happiness for both of you", is very reassuring), Jared enfolded her gently in his arms, earning a surprised yet very pleased female squeak at the affection she found there, and whispered into her hair his first words spoken verbally in this conversation after her initial, "Hi!"

"Sailor Venus, is there anyone I should go to in order to ask their permission to marry you?"

She melted all over him and reformed into a sitting position on his chest, her eyes locking on to his, searching his face for whether or not he was serious. And, upon seeing *exactly* what she'd wanted in his gaze, got hit by such a surge of excitement that the next thing he knew they were standing and he'd been dragged over to where Amy had just saved a car full of a family with small children from crashing.

~And I thought *I* was fast!~ came his first coherent thought after the dizzying motion.

Venus had molded herself perfectly to his side, and could not be more pleased that he was cooperating! Earlier she'd been ecstatic over a mere hug! Him being a gentleman about it, even when she would have let him go further, only served to reassure her that he wanted a long term relationship too.

Then he'd gone and SAID IT!

SQUUUEEEEEEEEEEEEEEE!

Mina's eyes were alight and on fire as she gave up wondering whether this were a dream or not. In fact, if it were a dream she'd like to hurry on to the ceremony and her honeymoon now, quick, before she woke up!

"AMY!HeProposed!"

~That probably should have taken at least half a second to say, and been two octaves lower,~ Jared concluded in the privacy of his mind.

Sailor Mercury was giving him a measuring gaze, along with a hint of disapproval. "That seems awfully fast. Shouldn't you get to know each other first?"

Jared drew in a deep and calming breath. Having Amy scold him, even mildly, was near top of his 'Do Not Do' list, just slightly above causing a zombie apocalypse.

"Okay, first of all, when in costume please address each other by your cape names. So, Sailor Venus meet Sailor Mercury. Mercury, Venus. Villains can't deliberately attack your families if they don't know your civilian IDs. Secondly, I *technically* haven't fully proposed yet, just begun the proposal process by asking for her to direct me to her guardians, or anyone else whom she feels appropriate for me to meet before asking for her hand. Any full proposal awaits their approval, and they'll typically have requirements for me to meet, so some months of serious dating are to be expected. But mostly..."

Jared paused, wondering how to put this. But then on realizing the relationship he hoped to have with all of them decided only full disclosure would be appropriate. "Well, I have some ability to predict the future and can tell that if we both put the effort in we could be great together."

Got to put the "put the effort in" clause in there, as if people expect a gimme they always ruin it, no matter how good it could have been.

Suddenly Venus cuddling into his shoulder straightened, broadcasting her intent to prove that she was a valiant little warrior of putting the hard work in to make their relationship come out perfect!

Jared found her adorable.

Mercury observed this exchange with some elements of trepidation and amusement blended together. "So you are precognitive?"

"Among other things," Jared nodded, leaning out of the way of an attack, bending his head to the side so that the sword in the hands of the gang member attacking him from behind swished harmlessly by.

Sailor Venus raised a hand to obliterate the thug swinging wildly at the sound of their conversation without saying her attack phrase or even detaching from her cuddle into his side.

Mercury blinked several times over this casual display.

Jared kept noticing how particularly fragile the people of this world being. The attacks they were being hit with were not that powerful, by his standards, but they were vaporizing their targets rather handily.

Mars had just finished roasting a man who had been menacing a pair of teens who'd been shopping together, leaving nothing but a thin trail of ash sparkling in the mist of the gangster.

A bolt of lightning as wide as she was tall from Jupiter (and Lita was a tall girl) wiped out the gang members who'd chosen to stay in their truck, who'd begun to spray bullets wildly out into the mist in vain hopes of striking an opponent while they cowered behind the shelter of its metal walls. Her attack partially melted the vehicle as it charred those inside, ending the threat they posed to everyone nearby, as a random spray like that could have hit anybody.

There even came a flash of light from Sailor Moon's attack, against a gangster who had found a family vehicle and climbed inside, trying to hold the innocents there hostage against the threats he could not see.

He had set her attack up to use Holy energy, instead of fire or lightning, as that seemed to him to be the truest to the original show. Also, it had the salutary effect of leaving innocents like the family in the vehicle unharmed, while totally vaporizing the gangster.

It was an interesting fight. Mostly the gang members couldn't coordinate, being completely blinded by the mist, and the Sailor Scouts had not yet the experience to coordinate, nor the need. So it had wound up being a small series of one-on-one battles close together as one or more of the blind gang members started menacing someone innocent in the fog, only to get wiped out by whichever of the Scouts noticed him.

Oh well, they'd get better with time and practice. This was actually excellent experience for them, better than he'd hoped for.

Mercury's eyes narrowed as she spotted one of the gang members running away from the fight, holding in one hand the bag of possessions stolen from the girls when they'd been captured. Among other things, that bag held her ruined phone, and if any of the memory chips survived much of her research and programs could be retrieved. So she wanted that phone, ruined or not, not to mention how badly they would miss some of those personal belongings that had been stolen.

Some of them would be impossible to replace.

So Sailor Mercury launched her second attack in anger that day, and froze the man to a corpsicle, then walking up to him calmly to reclaim their bag.

The light tinkling of frozen fingers hitting the sidewalk largely went by ignored. But Jared was glad that he had loaded in measures to aid in protecting the girls' emotional states, so they would not be traumatized by this.

There came a final flash of fire from Sailor Mars as she finished off the last gangster, and that was the end of that fight, as there were no gang members left in the mist to do battle against, they all having perished under the Scouts' various attacks.

~Really not bad for a first time out,~ Jared appraised from where Sailor Venus had backed him up to a wall and molded herself against him. He could see the kinetic controller on top of a nearby building, but he doubted the Scouts could...

... and proving that thought correct, Sailor Mercury dropped the covering mist, thinking they were safe.

Two cannon shots rang out almost immediately.

A flash of white through the air, and then a crazy scene hung before people's eyes in one of those moments that is so clear it seems to last an eternity, as a white feather of the same type as had previously crushed in the truck's roof fixed itself into a building's stone wall.

Behind it, on the path it would have traveled from Jared's outstretched hand, were two cannon balls hung suspended in the air, both cut cleanly in halves and robbed of momentum by the feather that had struck them and carved both cleanly in twain.

Jared LOVED being legally able to do things like that by D20 rules!

He hadn't been able to move from where Venus had him pinned to the wall without hurting the girl cuddling into him, so he'd done the only thing he could - to interrupt the attack with another attack. Only it came off feeling far more genre-appropriate than he'd planned for.

As if to back up that statement, a spark of black energy touched on the ruined and partially melted truck the gang members had been hauling the girls as prisoners in, and the whole mass of metal morphed into a mostly humanoid, vaguely truck-shaped, yet still clearly female form.

"A youma?!" Jared stared at it unbelieving for fully half a second before his brain kicked in, as whatever it was, his senses were reading that thing's power level on about the level of an instance boss in Warcraft.

In other words, at a completely overwhelming power scale for him and his small band of unequipped Sailor Scouts to handle.

"He who fights and runs away, lives to fight another day," he mumbled softly under his breath, not intending to be heard, but still clearly understood by the Scouts. Drawing on the fact that he could cast a spell affecting the whole group of them, Jared quickly teleported them all out of there, drawing his destination out of Serena's mind, as he didn't know of any safe places on this planet.

So they appeared with a slight bamf of displaced air right in the living room of that girl's home, startling a small number of women who had already been there.

Immediately recognizing several of them, Jared scanned the minds of his friends to confirm what he knew from the show, and having found the information reliable, he grabbed the lot of those present and pulled everyone with him into another Time Stop, this one lasting for a full day, but all but exhausting his ability to do that further until he recharged.

He had only a single use of that left. But this way several hours could pass in the necessary conversations and introductions, 'getting to know you' social duties and recounts of recent major events in all of their lives without losing any time out on the streets where a monster was rampaging.

In other words, everyone could afford to get caught up and settle their feelings about recent changes in their lives before having to rush out again into a life or death struggle - a struggle he had every intention of cheating on as hard as he could!

But first he had the realities of the current social situation to deal with, and this before they even figured out they were in a Time Stop.

"Hey everyone!" Serena sang out, practically dancing for joy. "Guess what? We're all parahumans!" She waved her arm, indicating the group of Scouts and Jared to the ladies who had stayed at home.

A thirteen-year-old went to hide behind one of the eighteen-year-olds, and Jared quickly perceived that their disguises worked, as none of the 'home crowd' apparently recognized their returning companions. So he acted rather quickly, canceling out his spells so the costumed Scouts reverted to their normal appearances.

Suddenly relief was palpable and everywhere there was hugging.

"Hey everyone, look who I found!" Mina introduced Jared perkily, somehow having worked her way in under his arm before she introduced him. "He was at the college, in the stadium that burned down, and I rescued him!"

Daawww! Okay, he could not resist giving her a cuddle and a fond smile over that.

"And he's a parahuman too!" Mina informed the group. "He makes *clothes*!"

"Actually," Jared corrected, directing a fond smile down at the girl in his arms. "It's a bit more general than that. I copied the ability from some djinni, or wish-granting genies, and while not up to the standards of a full Wish I can create anything plant based. So cotton for clothes."

"How much/soon/often?" rang the questions out, with blue-haired Amy throwing in the kicker. "Is it permanent?"

"Oh yes, it's permanent," he reassured her. Did Mina in his arms just giggle in delight?

Yes, she did.

Nor was she the only one impressed.

"Can you create spices, like for cooking?" Lita inquired, somewhat awestruck already.

"That would be no problem at all," he reassured the girl, who if he recalled was the girl who most enjoyed cooking among them. And she was good at it.

Suddenly everyone got a *great deal* friendlier, and the atmosphere in that room lifted by several degrees as the oldest two girls led Jared carefully over to their best couch - Mina still attached to his side and giggling by this point.

"How much can you make?" the oldest girl present asked, a green-haired beauty who looked to be about twenty.

"And how often?" Amy inquired, a somewhat desperate tinge to her voice.

Seeing no reason not to, he answered both questions honestly. "I'm not sure of my maximum, but it's at least seventy-two cubic feet. No particular weight limit, just volume. And I can do it at least four times per day."

Unless he mistook, those were genuine gasps of awe.

Did the tallest blonde (the home crowd one, not one of the two blondes he'd arrived with) just loosen a top button or two? No, surely not!

"Can you show us?" a beautiful older girl with long and wavy aqua hair inquired prettily.

They all had fixed pretty firmly in the fronts of their minds the sort of things they wanted him to demonstrate his power on creating. So it was trivial to read those. The difficulty came from concentrating on so many disparate and varied items, but even so that fell well inside of his abilities.

The added distraction of Amy molding herself to his side opposite of Mina, and Serena proudly taking pride of place in his lap didn't help his concentration any.

Of course, a lot of what they wanted was not inside of his capability, as televisions or new computers or cellphones were effectively minerals, not vegetable. Silk for clothes was an animal product, and the brightly-colored modern dyes everyone was familiar with were a product of chemistry, not plants.

With some rare but notable exceptions, plant based dyes tended toward earth tones, and were fairly brown and muted overall. So he couldn't do the exact outfits most of them were thinking of when they thought of clothes. But he could do approximates. Luckily he could do elastics, as most of the good ones were rubber-based products, and natural rubber (also the highest quality, so included as an ingredient in practically all of the synthetics) came from a plant native to South America.

Rubber was another thing sorely lacking now that worldwide shipping was in the past - and it was rather prominent in these girls minds, as they wished for clothes, that drawstring and button panties were just not as comfy as the elastic waistband variety.

Jared concentrated on the table before him and reality sort of shimmered. One moment there was empty air above the table, the next it was filled with colorfully wrapped presents in a pile overflowing the table, a mountain of wrapping paper covered boxes six feet long, three feet wide, and four feet tall.

Gasps came from all around, and the smallest girl, Holly, the girl he would know from the show as the diminutive Sailor Saturn, reached up with wondering awe to take down the top package of the edge of the pile nearest her, only to find a name tag dangling from the bow on it's top, one reading with her name.

She turned liquid eyes on Jared. "Is it alright to open them?"

Looking around the very humble abode they shared, the tired furniture and their well-worn clothes that had not seen replacements in too long, Jared fixed her with a gaze filled with sympathy and loving kindness. "Go ahead. We can make another batch for everyone's Christmas. For now, I wouldn't want you to be uncomfortable a moment longer."

He meant uncomfortable in their obviously worn clothes, but they took that as permission to open everything and satisfy their curiosity, as it was uncomfortable to wonder.

Jared had prepared for each of the nine girls present eight cubic feet of clothing and other sundries. The clothes were compressed, as if vacuum packed, to fit the most in his limit of volume, any gaps in the packaging created by large items had been filled up by cramming socks or other smaller stuff in, so there was scarcely a square inch wasted in all of that.

Serena was off his lap in an instant, opening the first box she found with her name on it to discover cotton outfits that, while the colors were not what she'd been dreaming of, were otherwise pretty close.

Jared could make masterwork items with his Major Creation power. The quality was the highest any of them had probably ever worn, as none had ever been able to afford a dedicated tailor and custom made outfits. It was the metal stuff that was lacking, so no rivets on jeans, no zippers, wooden buttons instead of plastic or metal, and the aforementioned lack of modern chemical dyes. There was also no leather, so shoes were absent. But within those limits, his quality was excellent.

And they could always sew in zippers later, if they were so inclined.

Serena came and engulfed him in a storm of hugs once she discovered that at the bottom of her first package were elastic waistband panties, but it was Lita's reaction that startled them all. She stood staring at a dark slab that at first none of them recognized, and they could see the poor girl was doing all in her power not to faint.

Jared apologized. "It's not milk chocolate, as milk and dairy are animal products and thus outside of my power. But it is the finest chocolate I could create within that limitation. You each have a twenty pound slab in your presents. I figured..."

But whatever he figured got lost, as further speech became impossible as the boy got mobbed by girls wishing him their earnest thanks, all babbling over each other in a happy pile.

"So tell me, Jared," the oldest girl, the green-haired beauty asked, "Do you like children?"

OoOoO

Amy's mind was reeling.

After all was said and done, and each of their presents opened, they'd found he'd given them each a pound of pepper, along with pounds of something like thirty other spices each in their own separate containers.

Saffron was included! A pound of saffron ran for something like six hundred dollars even before the collapse of international shipping, as there was no way to automate the process! Every gram had to be harvested by hand in the field from the flowers, making it the single most expensive spice in the world. And he'd given each of them a whole POUND without even blinking!

The block their apartment complex stood on could be sold for less than the price of a few ounces now. And that wasn't their only spice, just the most expensive one!

Christina had said something about "The spice must flow," only to be bummed that no one else got what was apparently a joke.

Still, that one gift of spices alone made them some of the richest girls in the Bay, if they chose to trade any of it. But they'd probably be robbed if they tried, so it almost certainly was not worth it.

Lita was in the apartment's small kitchen, quite contentedly cooking up a celebratory feast to end all feasts, using spices she'd given up dreaming of having. And it was not just spices, she now had access to several different kinds of very high quality flour and rice, plenty of sugar, fresh fruits and berries of all types and vegetables in profusion, including things that none of them had seen outside of old photographs in years.

And she could use as much as she wanted of the good stuff, filled with every confidence that Jared could replace her stockpile as easily as he had created the first.

It was shaping up to be an excellent feast, and Lita was having fun preparing it.

All of the girls present were wearing their new clothes. And if zippers were absent, elastic waistbands were plentiful.

Chocolate stains were present around quite a few mouths. The only ones lacking being those belonging to girls who had a tidier hand with a napkin to wipe up any remains.

The apartment's only shower was running, as Rae, the lucky winner of their contest drawing straws, got to try out the soap, bath gels, scents, perfumes and other beauty products their boy had provided.

It was not comfortable living in a world where something as simple and basic as soap was in short supply. But without the petrochemical industry functioning at full bloom, that was one of those chemical products that you never had enough of.

Luckily, Jared knew enough about old-fashioned soap making that he could produce some out of olive oil and lye taken from wood ash, and scented with actual flower essences rather than the chemical substitutes and approximations the modern world used. So they were never going to be short on body soap or laundry soap or dish detergent ever again!

The house was already looking cleaner, as the aqua-haired Michelle led thirteen year old Holly through a celebratory cleaning.

Amy's eyes were shining with unshed tears of joy and happiness, as all those hours, all of that time spent wondering if they could survive, and trying to solve unsolvable problems like supply shortages due to lack of international shipping, all resolved now as they had a boy whose power, while it could not give them everything, provided so much they could never doubt their survival again.

So long as they could keep him, that is.

His answering Susan's question about liking children with the scripture, "Children are an heritage of the Lord, and happy is the man who has his quiver full of them," had brought his stock even higher in their eyes, as that kind of man was liable to stick around if he got some girl pregnant.

Susan and Mina were not alone in having excused themselves to plot a seduction.

Amy could see where they were coming from, and sympathize.

This man was better than a billionaire. All a billionaire could claim was cash, and cash was only as good as the buying power the markets gave it. So if the banks finished collapsing all cash would be good for is wiping your bottom on. No, this man produced real wealth, in almost limitless quantities. He may as well be a genie for all they were concerned, as there were plenty of wishes he could grant, and any he could not they could probably trade what he could create for.

Amy felt certain there was not a seamstress or clothing shop in the world, but certainly not in Brockton Bay, that would refuse to trade them a zipper in exchange for a pair of genuine elastic waist panties.

There were women (certainly down at the junkyard) who would gladly trade them a CAR for a few sets of elastic waist panties! Amy felt like a queen wearing hers.

OoOoO

As they gathered together for the feast that Lita, along with a few of her friends, had prepared, Jared noted several empty chairs around the table.

That was the point Serena burst into the apartment, saying in concern, "Guys, I was just over next door to tell mom and the other parents that Lita's delicious feast was ready, but none of them could move! They are all frozen, like stone!"

"Do not concern yourselves," Jared interrupted, to head off the panic that was obviously building. "That's normal, and to be expected. I'm sorry that I didn't explain earlier. I'd meant to, but events kind of got carried away from me."

"What happened?" Lita looked kind of betrayed.

"Yeah, why did you freeze our parents like that?" Even Mina looked kind of hurt.

Jared waved his hands quickly, cutting off the blame storm while it was still forming. "Nothing bad! Your parents are fine! Nothing is wrong with them at all. The entire rest of the world is like them right now, and they won't even notice when it's over. I just... the power I used is called Time Stop, and only the people in this room are affected. We are all acting 'between the ticks of a clock' as it were. One interpretation is we are all moving so fast that the rest of the world seems motionless. The other major theory is time is quite literally stopped for everyone but us, and the objects we interact with. No, I don't know how running water and a gas stove function when time is stopped, but the spell works like that. You can interact with the environment normally, just as if it wasn't frozen. To be honest it's awfully convenient the way it is so I'd never looked into why for fear it might stop. Like I said, I am sorry for not bringing this up before, but events kind of got away from me."

He scratched the back of his head in embarrassment. "It's actually kind of a trick to get the spell to last this long, but it should run a full 24 hours. Also it's no small achievement getting so many people included at once, let me tell you. The spell was designed so that a lone mage could grab a few extra seconds during the middle of a crisis. It was never meant to move a crowd this big, or for so long."

"So why did you?" Lita was over feeling hurt, but still very puzzled.

Jared sagged. "Because of that monster. I don't know if all of you saw it, but on the street where our battle took place, the truck they'd used to carry you morphed into its own kind of monster. One that if I didn't know better I'd swear was a youma - a certain kind that has no excuse for existing on this world at all. Anyway, that thing was so powerful that we could not fight with it and live, so I took us all here, then gave us time to assimilate all that had happened so we would not be off balance. I figured after everyone was calm and rested we could discuss what to do about it."

They were brand new to having super powers. Jared's reasoning was that if they got shoved into too much too fast that could break. So he gave them some time to recover from the first set of shocks before adding on any others.

"But if we could not fight it and win, what is there to discuss?" Serena sang the question from her place in his lap, arms around his neck as she pondered his puzzling statement.

Jared lifted his head, looking them each in the eyes in turn. "Because only a few days ago I had no powers at all. Then I got online, contacted Uber and Leet, and hired them to run a job to create a device that grants powers. Only they tricked me, and I came out of that game female, and an elf..."

"The Christmas Elf!" Rae shouted, figuring that out ahead of the rest. Then she cocked her head curiously. "That was you?"

Jared nodded. "So I went out to gather the parts I'd need to create another device that grants powers, and that is what Mina saved me from. I was still hooked in to that when the building started burning. My best guess is that, while I came out a blood elf, Uber and Leet came out as undead, and everything undead hates the living. So I believe they caused that building fire in an attempt to destroy me."

They all sat absorbing that information for several moments.

"So how does that affect our situation?" Susan, the oldest girl at the table, asked.

"Because while the program from my own device is lost, I can create a duplicate of the one that Uber and Leet first used on me. Both function like computer games, only everything you learn in the game, every power or skill you gain, is real and sticks with you once you are restored to the real world."

Many gasps of indrawn breath and widened eyes as they realized what he was offering.

"The game they used was based on World of Warcraft, which is one of those massive, multiplayer online games, only one that apparently never got very popular on this world. But if you learn cooking, or the tailoring skill, or leatherworking, or anything like that in the game, those skills become real. And as grand as that sounds, and it truly is excellent, that actually pales by comparison to the ability to teleport, throw up energy shields around yourself, and fling fireballs like the game also teaches."

The silence that followed was both stunned and profound.

"But if you can do that already, why did we run from that monster?" Rae demanded.

"Because I can't do enough of it, unequipped and alone," Jared returned softly. "I gave you girls powers, but those were brief and temporary, more loans of my own abilities on a lower end scale. You could not fight then at the levels needed to destroy that thing, and I don't have any of the gear or equipment needed to boost my abilities to where they'd need to be for me to face one. Most important of all, even fully equipped I'd need a similarly powerful team to take something like that on."

"So you are offering us superpowers?" Christina, she of the unbuttoned blouse, inquired.

"In a word: Yes," he replied bluntly, boldly meeting her eyes.

"Wait," Mina proclaimed. Holding up a hand she gestured, creating a flat plane of force out of thin air, then twisted it back and forth. "So you gave me the ability to create and manipulate force fields?"

Jared's jaw hung open, and he blinked rapidly a few times before figuring it out. "No... I didn't." He favored the girl with a fond smile. "Congratulations, Mina. You must have gone through a trigger event, so you are the only genuine parahuman here."

"Perhaps not the only one," Amy interjected, raising her newly repaired smartphone. "I've already rebuilt my phone, and have so many ideas on how to improve it that I can scarcely resist tearing apart the toaster and refrigerator for parts. I think I am a Tinker."

"Well, congratulations, both of you." Jared gave both girls their own firm hugs. Then he paused for thought. "You know, I told kind of a fib to Uber and Leet because I knew they would not likely respect me if I had no superpower, so I told them I had a lame one. Only I might have gone overboard because it was so lame they took pity on me, and Leet built a device that could make copies of both of their powers, and program those into a new person. They offered me the choice between which set I wanted, but I chose both. So if you want I could build those devices again, and let both of you enjoy each of those powers. Hey, all of us could use them!"

"So we could all be Tinkers and, what was it, force field manipulators?" Rae seemed stunned in awe at the opportunity. "I'm in."

"And me!" Lita sang out, shortly to be followed by the rest of them.

"Yes, you must give us all a good spanking," Christina chirped in. Then, when everyone stopped to look at her, she shot back, "What?"

OoOoO

Author's Notes:

Yes, Mina and Amy both had trigger events last chapter, and are now parahumans with abilities based on both their needs and desires at the time they triggered. Mina wanted to protect her friends and stop bad guys, so got force fields, excellent at both stopping and protecting. While Amy had an unsolvable problem she had been grappling with for some time, which according to the source author defines the trigger event for Tinkers.

Her specialty? Computers, because it was information she was seeking that whole time.


	9. Chapter 9

Stepping on Worm  
Chapter Nine

by Skysaber  
aka Perfect Lionheart

OoOoO

Gaining superpowers was almost faster than the telling of it. Just jump in an arcade game.

Jared's duplicates had already secured the needed materials, assembled the device, and even prepared life support capsules.

After being told that the Warcraft game's engineering skill could be the answer to his "never build it more than once" problem, Leet had gone understandably a little crazy. After that revelation he would never have been able to resist adding all sorts of engineering patterns representing things from all sorts of games when they'd been setting up the server.

Unfortunately, their selection was pretty spotty and haphazard, representing enthusiasm more than clear thinking. It included a stupid amount of nonfunctional costumes, ones they'd meant to grant powers but didn't, as well as a selection of impractical geek dreams like plans for a Death Star (required more resources than were probably available in the whole Earth), an embarrassingly underdressed young lady in carbonite they'd no doubt intended to use as a decorative wall hanging (that pattern requiring just some yogurt and coal to make, presumably for a clone base and the carbon), blueprints for star destroyers, a handful of different TIE fighter types, the famous Rebel fighters, a Corellian Corvette just like Princess Leia's famous blockade runner, a frigate from Return of the Jedi and a Marauder Corvette that never made it into any of the films, plus an eclectic mix of stuff from Dune, Mechwarrior and other series, including a VF-series Veritech, the SDF-1, and so on.

All of the big stuff required positively ludicrous amounts of resources to make, so much so that not even any of the major nations on Earth could build them, not even if they teamed up, so did not get considered by Jared for production. And over half the stuff he did not even recognize; not what it was, nor even what series it came from.

A further complication preventing many of these engineering patterns from seeing reality was that many of those construction projects required tools they did not have - like they'd never included plans for any kind of space dock or starship assembly area. Uber and Leet had probably figured they could add additional blueprints for that kind of stuff later.

The most abusive things they'd thrown in were out of various fight games, and Jared only knew of them because they'd sometimes asked him to chime in with his preference. So there were Green, Blue, and Pink Lantern power rings, but no charger for them (Jared hadn't asked for pink, they'd just given him that as another joke), and some intelligent devices out of Magical Soldier Lyrical Nanoha. Uber had chosen Fate's halberd, Leet had gone for a copy of Signum's sword, while Jared had chosen Raising Heart itself.

In those cases, the joke was on them, as Leet had input those patterns without any attached ingredient list - but instead of being free to build, those requirements had filled themselves in, so they all had some pretty specific creation requirements that simply could not be met locally, and Jared personally doubted an experienced multiverse traveler could ever get to all of the things on the ingredient lists. It was a pretty daunting set of requirements.

So there was an amazing selection of engineering patterns available - it's just most of them were useless, as no one could ever be expected to hold enough steel in his bags to be able to make a Death Star, or even a decent cruiser, or achieve any of the weird, esoteric, halfway-philosophical goals needed to build one of those power rings.

And the less said about the requirements for those intelligent devices, the better. They made the Death Star look easy. Both required massive infrastructure that could only be provided by an advanced, galaxy-spanning empire just to produce the parts, but after that the Death Star just required insane volume and mass. The intelligent devices were as much art as science, and required precision craftsmanship by people with advanced degrees in skill sets Jared had never heard of before.

Power rings beat them both. 4th dimensional thinking would only be a start on one of those. In fact, he rather suspected that 4th dimensional thinking would only let you understand how badly outclassed you were at even understanding some of their creation requirements.

So none of those would be appearing anytime soon.

Luckily, not all of those recipes they'd programmed in were useless.

Some were downright practical and useful.

After their own less than ideal experience using modern medical beds, Leet had created an engineering pattern for alien looking, science fiction style life support pods - probably taken from some game that Jared didn't recognize. Still, they worked and were far more dignified than the hospital version. No tubes going into unmentionable places for one. So Jared whipped up enough of those pods for every girl to have one, placing them in what corners of their apartment he could find - which left the already crowded place feeling rather stuffed, but when it got explained this saved them all the indignity of catheters and IV drip bags, everyone was *sooo* glad to have them!

Their redhaired new best friend and romantic interest made certain the girls had those guides for running through both levels and skills quickly, explaining as he did so that the game was designed to be a near-infinite time sink, so it was possible to spend thousands of hours on it, chasing after one extraneous detail or another - and in fact that it was designed to make you do exactly that. So sticking to those guides was crucial if they wanted to achieve the goals they wanted in the amount of time they had available.

At that, Jared cast another Time Stop for the group, this one lasting a full 48 hours, so they could have the time needed to run the full simulation without any worry about cutting it short.

Then the group got going.

Jared set himself up, fully intending to jump in with them, however when he hit the control for them all to enter, the girls entered the game successfully but he stayed behind. Normally this would be quite puzzling, but with this being the second time, and with the obscenely high intelligence score he had, as well as the number of ranks he had in related skills it was pretty easy to get at the heart of the reason why.

What he concluded was Leet's curse with quirky technology that often malfunctioned on him had hit this invention at least twice. Once, the inability to repeat-build it, had been overcome by turning it into a pattern for the Engineering skill from Warcraft.

The other wasn't the 'build it once, all others explode' curse Leet was so famous for, but in its way almost as vexing, as experience showed that you only got to log into each training game once. In his enthusiasm Jared had forgotten Leet's inventions often had other notable quirks like that. And, having played their version of the Warcraft training simulator, he was not going to be allowed in again, even on what was essentially a brand new copy.

That made him *SOOO* glad that he'd picked everything up on the first run. Being a completionist had its advantages, at times.

So the only thing lost, really, was his opportunity to play along with the girls. He'd intended to be a mod for them, just as he'd done for Uber and Leet, summoning bank tellers and mailboxes and other things in order to make the game easier on them. However, none of that turned out to be necessary, as they all emerged unscathed, in proper order, before any of the Time Stop spells ran out.

Although there were one or two little surprises.

"What? Do you mean you ALL trained as Mages?" Jared asked, dumbstruck.

At first he had been filled with pride at seeing the girls almost reflexively casting their buff spells as they emerged from the alien life support cocoons.

Then he'd realized that every last one of them was casting the same spells.

"Well, it seemed the best class," Amy offered primly, brushing out her hair and unsure why he was so against their decision. "After all, the ability to summon food and water means we'll never go hungry. Teleports are almost unique to mages and are by far the best means of transportation, not to mention the wide array of personal force fields, attack spells, ability to summon their own minions, and general utility spells available to them. Why? Do you not like the class for some reason?"

She blinked glowing eyes at him, her tone came across implying that if he'd had such an objection, he should have raised it before they all went playing.

Jared hung his head in defeat. "No, I agree with all you've said. In fact, I prefer the mage class myself. Only I'd just learned after you'd all gone in that we only get one try at this. That is why I was unable to join any of you as mod support as we'd planned. The game wouldn't let me in. And good as the mage class is, the way party structure works grants enormous advantage to having a broad range of classes involved. Standard setup calls for three roles: One that absorbs damage well, one that heals damage effectively, and others to do damage. Of those, damage dealers are the least important, and that is the only role that mages fill well. They can't heal, and are renowned for how poorly they resist harm compared to the other classes."

"Oh," Amy made a soft noise of disappointment, echoed by most of the rest of the crowd of girls who'd been listening in as they'd set their own appearances to rights after days spent in those science fiction cocoons. "I wish we'd known that going in. We would have made more effort to max all of the skills and get all of the recipes."

Nodding, Jared raised his head. "So do I, but there's nothing for it. I did not figure it out until it was already too late, so we'll just have to live with it." He gave them all a supportive grin. "Still, if you had to pick any one class to be stuck with, mages are among the best. The only ones arguably better would be paladins or druids, who can switch hit to fill any role, but they don't have nearly the breadth of utility spells. Actually, as far as 'most comfortable class to live as' mages win first choice by a mile - for all of those reasons you've already said."

"Food and minions and teleports do a lot to liven up life," Rae agreed with a sparkle in her glowing eyes. Then she glanced down at her hands in shock, before darting over to look in a mirror - while incidentally drawing Jared's attention to her discoveries as she made them.

It arguably said something significant about him that he noticed the physical changes, more slender builds, taller, narrower faces, more vibrant hair, and of course the pointed ears and brightly glowing eyes only after his reaction to their class had been resolved.

"Hey! Now we're all Christmas elves!" Rae exclaimed brightly in surprise at her own condition, posing before a mirror so she could examine her reflection - a mirror that was soon crowded with all of the girls.

Yes. They'd all become blood elves.

"Don't worry! I can change you back!" Jared waved his hands frantically, before muttering something hard to catch about Leet's programming, and 'at least it wasn't undead', and "And now we come to the *third* drawback of Leet's design - it still changes your race, even when it shouldn't."

Serena was blinking thoughtfully, posed with a finger on her bottom lip. "Aren't you still an elf?" she asked curiously.

The boy began to rub the back of his head sheepishly. "Yeah, but I like being an elf. I'm used to it, and besides I know at least a dozen powerups unique to elves, as well as how to circumvent all of the disadvantages, even look like a human when I want to blend in. So yeah, I'm actually quite comfortable with it. Having ten times the lifespan isn't bad, but it's mostly the little things you cherish, stuff that never gets mentioned in any rulebook. For instance ice cream tastes better this way. Most flavors do, actually, and I don't know why..."

He trailed off absently.

The girls all shared amused smirks over his mention of ice cream tasting even better. Of course, they would all be trying some in the near future. In fact, Michelle and Holly both went to the kitchen to fetch back tubs so they could start serving out bowls.

"So," Serena chirruped delightfully, leaning deeply into his personal space, "Who would you be more comfortable marrying? An elf or a human?"

"Oh, an elf obviously," Jared concluded absently, his mind on other things. "I don't approve of half-elves. They're mostly just there to please fans of tragic romance. And I have no use for tragedy. Frankly, I prefer 'Happily Ever Afters' to the soul-crushing agony you'd face as spouse and then children die before you, leaving you to deal with an eternity of loneliness - and I think anyone who seeks out that kind of misery must be sick in the head. No, I'd never marry a human." His distraction made the boy brutally honest.

The girls all shared some very significant looks.

Then the ice cream started to get passed around and they all got lost in bliss. Toes got curled and squeeing sounds made.

Though the portions were small and the flavors few, great delight was had by all around.

OoOoO

"You know, once you said that Leet designed the first of these, I could understand why they are so wonky. The guy's inventions are infamously unreliable," Christina opined, kicking back on a sofa and fluffing out locks of her more-yellow-than-humanly-possible hair.

She, like many of these girls, had been very blonde before. But that wasn't a patch on what they had now. Frankly, Jared was relieved that she found it so amusing.

The others had calmed down out of their budding freak-out when he'd successfully pointed out that, for a D&D wizard (which he was) changing someone's race was trivially easy. That made the 'new look' temporary, and suddenly they'd become eager to explore it, rather than being upset over it.

The girl had all shared knowing glances. Although none of them had communicated anything overtly, nonetheless they all knew they'd reached an agreement already. And as far as they were concerned it went without saying that, if he was only going to marry an elf, then no way were any of them going to return to being human!

In fact, they all felt deliciously naughty with the knowledge that so far as anyone knew they were the *only* elves around for him to marry! I mean, since he swore he would never marry a human and the rest of the girl in the world were human that sort of gave Serena and her friends an automatic victory, didn't it?

Deliciously naughty giggles and much blushing accompanied those thoughts, along with stolen glances over the male territory they felt a good deal of ownership over already.

Which was good, as while changing someone's race was easy, doing so without consequences like nerfing Amy's brilliant intellect and the unusual beauty shared among them was a little more difficult, as polymorph spells, the usual 'go to' for that sort of thing, liked resetting people to the average of their new species.

But average simply would not do for these girls.

There were other options to be explored. They would fix this. But the true remedies took more time than simple spells he already held memorized, and right now he was working on a different priority.

The girls had all used the "copy powers, kill powers, receive dual powers" system inside of the game, which Jared had not been allowed to enter. So he'd been forced to build actual, physical copies of those devices Leet had designed for copying and killing powers. The only problem there was a mild hold up with Jared as the force field and computer tinkering powers did not want to copy to him on the first try. But a second, more determined, attempt did succeed.

Then it was out to the bay.

OoOoO

"What's he doing?" Holly asked, clinging to the side of the older girl Susan. The collected group of girls had followed Jared outside for a project and were standing on the waters of the Bay, which itself was quite a change, but apparently Jared (or Jay-chan as Mina had started calling him) had a spell for that.

Even more remarkable was the softly falling snow hung frozen and immobile in midair, looking like a picture postcard.

It was gorgeous.

Susan smiled softly as she made her response. "Every bay I've ever heard of has islands. They also have almost-but-not-quite islands, mountains on the sea floor that almost break the surface but don't. Navigation hazards is all they are, as ships must avoid them, but they are not useful for anything. Jared is over one of those now, but I don't..."

At that moment the boy they were watching finished his chanting and thrust his arms into the air, causing the waters around and below them to ripple, before parting in a circular, outgoing wave as a smooth platform of rock thrust upwards, displacing the water.

A platform of stone that stood six feet above the water, and was about as big around as the walled compound around the Tower of Isengard from the Lord of the Rings movie. And suddenly those girls were not standing on water anymore, as the platform of stone extended far enough to have risen up beneath them.

In moments Jared walled the entire perimeter of that area with more stone, smooth white marble to a height of thirty feet or so, added six feet of topsoil to the land now contained therein, raising the girls upwards as he did so, and was in the act of raising a tower large enough to compete with a mid-sized skyscraper in the middle of this newly created island, also made out of smooth white marble.

"Wow," Lita brushed hair out of her eyes, blown about by the brief moment of ocean spray he'd created. "When he said we couldn't just base our hero team out of our apartment I was thinking he'd just take over an abandoned warehouse or something, like everyone else."

The first of many hundred foot tall apple trees sprung up moments later. Somehow they understood the stone beneath was changing shape to accommodate the root system.

And then he made the brand new island invisible.

Amy was staring intently as he worked. "Placing our new base over a former seamount is a brilliant tactic! Ships are already used to avoiding the area... if we still had any ship traffic in the Bay, that is. But the navigation charts all say to avoid that location because of the underwater rocks. So if they avoid it, and no one can see it, it's all but undetectable!"

"Yeah," Mina agreed, standing confidently as she stared at their man. "It's so much better than an abandoned factory or warehouse. If you make your hero base in one of them, then gang members or homeless people might wander in and find your stuff by accident."

"Not to mention the plumbing in those old places hardly ever works," Serena added, holding her nose, then noticed the other girls staring at her. "What? Haven't you ever been desperate for a bathroom?"

OoOoO

The new base was needed for new space.

As good as the girls apartment had been for dwelling in a secure place, they'd all been packed in rather tightly by western living standards, which meant there had not been a lot of extra room around for machinery or tools.

In short, no room for workshops. No place to put the anvils or forges necessary for smiths to ply their trade, for engineers to work, and so on. The Warcraft game taught an *obscene* number of skills ideal for outfitting a small group of heroes, but unlike the game those same skills in real life needed some space to spread out their tools and do the work.

To say nothing of the extras.

Jared explained, "I'd asked Leet when he was programming the game to please plug up all of the holes in the supply pipeline, as some parts and ingredients just have to be purchased, and as we were not going to bring the entire warcraft world out with us, we would not have access to the venders who sold those things."

He glanced at the girls and shrugged. "I failed. Ok, he made a bit of an effort, but overall Leet found that boring as he'd rather be programming the ability to make things like Dungeon Hearts so he could play other games inside of that one. So most of the ingredients our crafting skills from that game call for, we don't have available here. That rather sharply limits the amount and variety of items we could make for our hero costumes. Sorry."

There came a complete lack of sorrow over thing from the girls watching him, who were glad for what they did have, as it seemed to them infinitely more than the nothing they'd had before.

"Ironically, one of those skills we ought to be best supplied on is making jewelry, as that skill includes the ability to create most of its raw components out of chunks of ore, and raw ore in chunks that size is insanely cheap on this world..." Jared trailed off. "Well, for any minerals that appear on this planet, anyway. So none of the more exotic stuff like Thorium, which leaves us again on the lower end side of what we can produce."

Their redheaded love interest frowned. "Actually, for this starter set of costumes that's got to be our single most limiting factor: we can't use any materials that aren't native to this planet."

"Only our starter set?" Serena materialized by his shoulder as if by magic, blinking curiously for an explanation.

"Well, yeah," the boy replied, guilelessly. "One of the reasons I became a D&D mage is those are able to teleport to any area they've had *described* to them. And we've all seen plenty of pictures and things describing the world the warcraft game is based on. I don't have any doubts I'll be able to teleport there. But buying stuff requires money, which we don't happen to have right now, so our starter set of costumes will have to be made out of things we've got available right now."

"Couldn't you teleport us over there and then we all earn money adventuring?" Mina asked.

"Much more dangerous," Jared replied grimly. "We'll want to be as protected as possible first, as stuff that is safe and predictable in the game won't be on the real world of Azeroth. So showing up over there wearing substandard protections is in the 'high risk' category."

Mina nodded, accepting that without complaint.

The much taller Lita popped her head over Mina's shoulder. "But we've played in that game. There are low-level areas where high-level characters like us could run around naked in and be alright, right?"

Jared paused, an odd look to his eye as he reordered his thoughts. "Yeah..." he began tentatively. "I suppose..." Suddenly he looked sheepish. "I'd been too focused on those areas where the best and most important crafting ingredients could be found, and are proportionately dangerous. But you're right. There are any number of towns or other safe areas we could go to."

"And whatever level of gear we'd pick up there would let us go to gradually more dangerous places, and by repeating that a few times we could go get the best stuff, right?" Lita pressed.

The redhaired boy shook his head in woeful admission of error. "You are exactly right." He motioned for the girls to cluster together. "Come on, everyone. Link up for a teleport."

Then it was off to warcraft-land as everyone vanished together in a flash.

OoOoO

While the real him was busy, several clones that Jared had discretely made using his self-duplication power separated themselves from the primary group a fair distance, then teleported.

One of those appeared in a vast desert of sand, clay and rock. Dust blew everywhere.

Heh, apparently the Time Stop spell did not apply across dimensions. Interesting.

Immediately on its arrival the double quickly cast spells on itself, the usual archmage survival kit, plus one for keeping the dust off him and stop it from interfering with his sight. Then he drew in a deep breath and gazed around sorrowfully at cracked clay soil that had once been one of the most lush farmlands on Earth.

California's Central Valley had never looked so dismal. Croplands that had once fed a surprising portion of the Earth now lay desolate and uninhabited.

The double tried to hide his sorrow at the sight of his home state being such a wasteland, but there was nothing for it, the Earth he had teleported to was not a nice place. Shrugging, as he had a different mission, he oriented himself and began to fly towards his destination.

The ability to go anywhere you'd even had a description of was just priceless! Because, when you'd accounted for the countless novels and games that described locations, some in pretty good detail, made for absolutely staggering possibilities!

There was some margin for error, of course, in teleporting via description alone, but that was why Jared was only sending duplicates, not his original self.

Luckily so, as something had felt much like smacking face-first into a wall of tar in the middle of his teleport to this place, and being forced to metaphorically wade through it in order to get anywhere. But at least he'd made it through, and could figure out the error (if that's what it was - sometimes things just went wrong no matter what you do) later.

Perhaps that was what had stripped off the Time Stop effect?

He didn't know, but back to business. One of the many games he had played in his youth was called Car Wars. It was by Steve Jackson, and depicted a planet where some of the scares of the eighties actually came true. Unlike the real Earth, where fresh reserves of oil kept being discovered faster than the most greedy drilling could use them up, here the world oil supply vanished in a single year like someone had flipped a switch.

Then, as if that had not been bad enough, the planet got struck by what they called Grain Blight, a disease that wiped out grasses and anything grass-like more effectively than the Black Death had killed men, leaving basically nothing behind. The guidebook for California said not even palm trees remained alive, having been too closely related to grasses.

The resulting famine had killed off most of the world's population, of course.

It was bad enough that all of the rice, wheat, barley and everything else grass-like in the ground just up and died all of a sudden, but it was not just the plants in the field that rotted, it was every bit of stored grain as well, even stuff that had already been processed into flour or baked into bread!

But naturally, it couldn't end there. You can't just suddenly lose that much biomass without it having a ripple effect. Grass was just too huge a part of the ecosystem not to be missed.

Cattle and other grazing animals died because they lost their primary food source, taking meat and dairy off the table at the same time as the human diet lost bread and rice. Even most wild herbivores like deer and rabbits perished, and the predators of those herbivores died also. So once the ripple had finished spreading there had come a mass die-off of just about anything that lived on land.

This Earth wasn't quite as bad as staring across a moonscape. But it wasn't pretty either.

No, suffering through a nuclear holocaust would have been much kinder. In fact, the planet had even had a nuclear war, but that paled to insignificance behind the other troubles it had been through, so most folks simply forgot that nukes had been tossed around.

Some of the glowing craters had even become tourist attractions - visited only in heavily shielded buses, of course.

Since the Grain Blight still existed, in dormancy, just waiting to flare up again the moment any grass appeared, that made this planet off-limits to anyone with even half a hint of sanity, as the very idea of carrying some invisible dust infected by that blight off to other worlds was simply too horrific to contemplate. It was a world-killer.

Which, explained exactly why Jared had only dared send a duplicate here. Despite being personally immune to disease, he wasn't going to take any risk of carrying some infected duct off tucked in some crevice of his clothes or whatnot. Theoretically his immunity stretched to cover even that - but he wasn't going to test that and risk destroying a world on a theory.

So the double he'd sent would simply never leave. That wasn't a problem because Jared had convinced Leet to add a mental uplink to his self-duplication power, so alot like Naruto's Shadow Clones, the original learned anything known by his copies when it vanished or got destroyed.

And there was technology here worth learning.

The Car Wars world had a very Mad Max feel to the whole place, hopeless poverty and lawlessness was the theme, with banditry omnipresent - only in this case it was all mingled with some very high technology. One of those was solar power cells that actually worked the way most people thought solar already did - and living up to the fantasies of people who had only ever heard hype was a difficult thing to do.

But no, here what civilization existed used solar almost exclusively as their power source, and were able to power lasers and other high tech gadgets from that no problem. That was a technology worth having.

Another was their plastics.

Here metal was scarce (go figure, they'd never explained that one. Iron was the single most common element on Earth by mass) so they used plastics for everything.

Sounds simple. Most wouldn't even think twice about that. Plastics were already common enough when most people imagined a future they often just pictured more of them in use. But going back a step: in real life plastics were a petrochemical product, meaning they were derived from oil, and this world hadn't got any!

But luckily science did have an alternate source for the chemicals required for plastics. All they needed was... grasses.

So ultimately the only two practical ways known to real world science for producing plastics, were completely unavailable in Car Wars, yet they used plastics for everything. They made their cars out of plastic. Their weapons, computers, even their clothes were plastic.

The modern world could not perform minor repairs on a car without parts shipped in from China, or wherever. Actually building them was out of the question without serious, multi-billion dollar global industries spread across the entire world in a vast interconnected web of parts and shipping.

So how did these guys build cars and stuff without that global transport and industry web?

Well, that was another technology worth discovering. Because this planet had sunk down to a level that was barely above the Old West. Political bodies larger than a small town were mostly theoretical. The countryside had been abandoned to bandit gangs, and the standard form of civilization was walled settlements existing more or less independent of each other, and without any reliable form of shipping in between.

Forget international shipping, these guys could not drive a car between neighboring cities without a near certainty of deadly combat. They plated their vehicles with armor and armed them with everything from machineguns and mine droppers on up to military tank guns and lasers because to do otherwise counted as a form of suicide.

Even serious and well-armed convoys ran a very real risk of death on short, commuter trips.

The key question here was: how did they do it? How did they manufacture cars, as well as the armor and weapons to put on them, targeting computers and other options when most settlements barely had enough residents to qualify as hickvilles?

Modern industry was serious business. To make something as simple as a wooden pencil involved products from like sixty five nations, between all of the various chemicals that went in to making up the yellow varnish, then the metal bit that held on the eraser, the eraser itself, the glue and graphite and everything else.

So simple a product, you'd never imagine how many countries got involved, how many miles those parts traveled over, or the mind-boggling array of everything that went into putting that together - All for a product that was cheap and ultimately disposable.

No, most people saw a consumer product appear on their shelves and never even imagined how complex were the processes that got it there. But people didn't build those huge complexes of soot-belching factories for fun, or because they liked the looks of them.

So the question remained: How did these people get modern cars, helicopters, and computer controlled weapons to put on them, when most of their population lived in villages so small that if you grabbed every man, woman and child from the youngest to the oldest they could not muster enough to fill an average high school?

The modern world got goods to towns of that size by shipping them in. Here that was impossible due to the constant bandit menace. Some shipping happened, but it wasn't near what anyone could call reliable, as you could count on any convoy arriving with a few bullet holes in it, some lives lost, and a few vehicles missing.

If a convoy arrived at all. Many didn't.

Helicopters weren't any safer, since stinger missiles were about as common as rifles, here. And both were in the 'don't leave home without it' category.

So whatever method they used to supply places, it wasn't the modern system of "build it elsewhere, then ship it in". That simply wouldn't work with shipping so unsafe and unreliable. People have got to be able to depend on their living necessities better than that.

The only answer that remained was those small hick villages made their own necessities.

So if these guys could, on scales from no larger than a couple hundred people at the smallest on up to the rare but present actual large cities, maintain an infrastructure capable of manufacturing enough food and plastics to meet all of their needs locally, to say nothing of a level of industry able to produce all of the modern tools and weapons they used, Jared wanted to know about it. Because that was as huge a shift as computers going from room-sized conglomerations of thousands of pounds of clunky hardware, down to a digital watch.

To put it another way - not since the days of the village blacksmith was a town able to make all of the tools and things it used, and even so the typical medieval peasant didn't own a lot worth having.

These people were able to do the same on a technology base that was able to provide a modern lifestyle and comforts, including cars and guns, body armor, and even practical laser weaponry to anyone that wanted it!

Shrinking the necessary infrastructure of modern living down from "spans the entire globe and requires the efforts of nearly every living person being involved or associated with it" down to "a couple hundred people can do it", was an advance of incalculable worth.

Jared was after it mostly because the world Brockton Bay stood on had a civilization that was getting hammered just about as hard as this place had been by their oil vanishing, and between Endbringers and other problems any technology that required more resources than a couple hundred people could manage, wasn't safe to rely on.

So Jared came here to fetch a technology base robust enough to survive apocalyptic cataclysms and keep on churning out the goods. A tech base where they'd improved on the electric motor and battery until it was not just practical to have electrically powered cars, overcoming the drawbacks those suffered in reality, they had become the standard. And not just cars, they had battery powered electric motors strong enough to be used for the main drive system on helicopters and aircraft, too.

Best of all, Car Wars technology base had only recently departed from the 20th Century norm, so could not be too different from it.

There were some other gems to be found: practical laser weaponry available for affordable prices at the consumer level, gauss guns the same, body armor that could take a burst from a machinegun before depleting, yet cheap enough for everyone to wear a suit. All of those were nice, but better ones could be found elsewhere. What made the ones here attractive was they were all simple enough to be within reach of a 20th century technology base.

However, the main reason why Jared had chosen this planet, besides their solar cells and plastics, was two related technologies. Somehow, and he didn't know how, these guys had perfected practical cloning technology at a level where they had a company, Gold Cross, selling actual life insurance in the most pure and literal sense. Meaning that if you died while you had a policy with them, they would arrange for your corpse to be brought to one of their clinics, where they would transfer your memories out of that body into a new clone so you'd wake up knowing everything you did right up to the moment of your death.

Not bad for a place that had never developed the internet.

And if they couldn't get your body to a clinic in time, or your brain had been splattered or something like that, you'd still wake up in your clone body, just with whatever memories it had up to your last update.

They strongly recommended for people to update their clone's memories once a month, and otherwise held your replacement body in a form of stasis until needed.

As if that wasn't going to be useful enough to know how to do on a world suffering from Endbringer attacks, the Car Wars world had a related technology that made learning everything they had developed a practical concern, and not something he would need to devote a handful of normal lifetimes to.

Because from the ability to store memories in your clone they had also discovered how to program additional skills into people; from scholarly ones like history and math, or the ability to understand how their plastics got manufactured, to active pursuits like how to drive a car in combat or shoot a gun.

Those last two were important because he'd need them just to survive, as magic use was not exactly common here, so he'd have to be discrete with it, which meant learning how to fight like to locals, at minimum.

One had to fit in, after all.

Jared's double landed well outside of the town he wanted and began to walk toward it, already scanning the rather limited skyline for the arena that was the easiest place to find that could direct him to the nearest Gold Cross, and from thence to the people who knew how to program those skills.

OoOoO

Author's Notes:

Well, back to this.

For those who don't know, winter typically makes a good bid at killing me, and most of spring typically gets spent putting my life back in order. So sorry for the delay, but I would have traded months of illness and weakness and misery for the ability to write more if I could.

Inserted some hints from the challenge I'd accepted into this bit.

Also, since it should now be absolutely clear that I need precisely zero help from the CYOA advantage points to utterly curbstomp this setting despite having taking the majority of disadvantages on the list, I paradoxically feel a great deal better about using them.


	10. Chapter 10

Stepping on Worm  
Chapter Ten

by Skysaber  
aka Perfect Lionheart

OoOoO

The sensation of slamming face-first into an infinite wall of tar mid-teleport ought to have been familiar to Jared, except that he did not have real-time updates from his duplicates, only when they were destroyed.

That's what he got for sticking too close to the source material he'd used for inspiration. That little blind spot was something he would've fixed if he could go back to do it over again.

Fortunately, he quickly found that he could sort'uv wade through easily enough, as whatever it was didn't stop physical movement (or at least his - the girls were quite stuck, but then, he was a great deal stronger than they were).

Come to think of it, when you can lift a locomotive above your head, you aren't the best judge of what physical tasks are easy. Nobody who can fold, bend and tear steel like it was tissue paper should be setting standards for people to whom steel was, you know, steel.

Since he could have shoved his way through a wall of titanium with less difficulty, perhaps it was a trifle inaccurate to call what they'd met mid-teleport a wall of tar, as it was probably a much more serious defense, but still, that was what it felt like, so what he'd called it.

After rescuing the girls from its grasp, he waded through with them, then resumed their journey with another teleport.

Teleporting was a bit difficult when you did not know your starting location, just like most travel agents will swear at you if you ask them to plot a trip for you, only you aren't able to tell them where you are starting. But fortunately, some places in the universe were specially designed to be easy to teleport to, and their destination had several. So he simply picked the biggest and most long-distance-friendly one, designed to make jumps between worlds easy, and headed for there.

Moments later they appeared on the planet Azeroth, location of the Warcraft games...

...standing in a sea of orcs.

Their Time Stop effect had also ended, and those orcs were doing as close as the savages ever did to marching, like a wild animal herd pressing in one single direction.

A herd whose more alert members had just begun to notice them.

The explosions and rescue happened so fast that it took a moment for the girls to even realize that their mutual teleport trip hadn't just ended with them starting about a mile in the air.

"What happened?!" Rae stared about wildly, giving voice to the question for all of them. Then, on spotting the tide of greenskinned orcs below them trudging in unending flood out of a Dark Portal, reflexively tossed an attack spell down at them.

The explosion, while devastating for the handful of orcs caught in it, was as nothing to the tide of millions of orcs moving down there.

Several gulps accompanied that realization. At least they were able to fly - another spell of Jared's they were certain. But they quickly summoned their own flying mounts, just in case the spell dropped or got countered or something.

Suddenly Jared was gone from among them, and just as suddenly he was back, holding an old guy in robes by the throat - a guy who seemed to be suddenly missing all of his limbs except his head. The tattered sleeves of the man's bloodied robe hung empty and ragged, with just empty space where the legs should be.

"Medivh." Jared snarled the name as a curse.

Rae caught the name, head shooting up from inspecting her saddle. "Archmage Medivh?" and as quickly as that she looked even more thunderous than Jared. "You mean the guy who conspired with evil to bring the orcs to this world, *that* Medivh?"

"The very one," Jared growled threateningly, never taking his eyes off the bearded face of the man he was slowly strangling.

"Kill him," she ordered, her eyes flat.

Jared perked up a bit, finally taking his eyes off the archmage for an instant so he could shoot a glance of approval at the purple-tressed girl. "Oh, gladly."

"Wait!" Serena interrupted, speaking for the group who was too shocked to squeak. "What's going on?"

Rae smiled towards her in a strained way that wasn't very nice. "Oh, nothing much. None of you were all that interested in the history of this place, so I wouldn't burden you with details. We're just going to kill a bastard who was the guardian of this planet, charged with protecting it from evil, then decided that it would be more fun to let the demonic invaders in instead."

"WHAAAT?!" hair toinged out over many scalps.

"Oh yeah," Rae presented in false cheer. "Keeping people safe was just too boring for him, so he decided it would be more fun to invite in countless invaders in armies that scourged this whole planet. Every race that lived here suffered massive casualties because of this guy - he's got a worse death toll than Hitler, more casualties to his name than all of World War II!"

"The *ENDBRINGERS* do not have a patch on this guy's death toll," Jared seethed. "A whole continent had every man, woman and child slaughtered, raped, and often EATEN because of this guy!"

Rae's tone was very quiet, but carried enormous anger while her eyes had narrowed to slits as she glared at the man, "And if they were lucky, the orcs did it in that order."

Serena's face went slack. "Kill him," she agreed.

"Most gladly," Jared nodded his head, tossing them a very not-nice smile that came freakishly close to Rae's seethingly dangerous one. "Because that was just during the First War. During the second, if the orcs had their victory, they committed genocide against the entire human race, not to mention every other creature on this planet - just like they'd done to their homeworld before coming here."

Rae closed her eyes and very deliberately calmed herself, shaking just a touch as she did so. Speaking with her eyes closed, she said, "Of course, in the *third* game, developers decided they wanted to make the orcs heroes instead, so they retconned in a whole new history where the demons were at fault for everything - including handing out Idiot Balls to practically everyone, so they could escape guilt by being stupid instead." She shook and her eyes flew open. "Oooh! This game makes me so angry! The whole 'Oh, no one is to blame for mass genocide on an incredible scale' is just so DUMB! People have to have their choices matter or existence doesn't make any sense at all! And if those choices lead to massive death and destruction, they ought to get punished for it!"

Jared snorted. "Believe me. I've got acquaintances who are experts on mind control - the more the mind you are controlling doesn't like what you are doing, the less chance they'll stay under your control. They'll fight, and eventually break free. And it doesn't take years, minutes will suffice. Saying 'demons did it', doesn't work, because on projects of this scope and scale - demons could not make you do anything unless it was something you already wanted to do in the first place."

They looked down and beheld the massive throngs of orcs surging forth in a tide from the immense gate of the Dark Portal. Years was the minimum period anyone could imagine anything on this scale being put together.

The armless and legless archmage slowly strangling in Jared's grasp had a face that was slowly turning blue. The redhead shook him a bit for effect. "So, quiz time! Multiverse theory is in effect. We do not know which version of Warcraft we just arrived in. That down there looks like the very first opening of this Dark Portal, which places us some months before the events of the First War that led to a continent about the size of South America having every man, woman and child hopelessly butchered by merciless orcs. The question is: Is this one of those worlds where humans win, only to be subject to war after war, then told they are the bad guys, or do the orcs slaughter everyone but themselves in just the first few years?"

"Multiverse theory?" Susan questioned carefully.

Rae was rubbing her forehead, struggling to put away the last vestiges of her temper. "He means, if this world was a game back home, yet actually exists as a real place at the same time, then at least one of the game designers had to be functioning as something like an oracle - seeing a real place, yet far away. So if those games had multiple endings, then whoever was seeing it saw multiple futures as well. Like do orcs win, or humans? Because either should be possible. And if that's the case, how do we tell which is going to happen?"

Christine shared a glance with Michelle, who nodded. Then the aqua-haired Michelle faced forward and asked, "Does it matter?"

The very blonde Christine cracked the knuckles of her fist. "Yeah. How about we just make sure the orcs lose?"

Jared nodded soberly. "It was a trick question anyway. I've read the rulebooks for this setting. I know what their spellcasters are capable of, their strengths and their weaknesses, and they are positively lousy at certain important staples like reliable detection of demons. While I, on the other hand, have so many interlocking abilities to do that, I can detect even those that are justly famous for their ability to avoid detection. So I can say confidently that this unspeakable character has not got any shred of demon in his system at all - he's just that evil. And I could detect a demonic possession if it were dormant and being stealthy, for a demon to be in active control so as to cause all this," he swept his arm to indicate the invading army of millions of battle-hungry orcs, "It would be far more obvious. So no, this guy has never been possessed by a demon. So that means?"

"This isn't a world that would reach the third Warcraft game and the retcon that would make that their official history," Amy concluded, then locked up in horror over the implications.

"Which means?" Jared pressed for the benefit of those who had not already leapt ahead.

"This is one of those worlds where the orcs win and slaughter everything," Lita concluded, looking sick.

"Exactly!" Jared chimed, quite inappropriately, some thought, until they realized his excitement was not that of delight, but of psyching himself up for battle.

"But first, let's deal with this guy," the redhead's gaze narrowed in like a laser on the limbless archmage who was still steadily strangling in his grasp. "While cutting off all of this guy's arms and legs and preventing him from speaking has reduced the amount of magic he could use, it did not eliminate it entirely. Like any skilled archmage, he's got spells he can cast as a silent act of will, emergency escape methods, and contingencies for his contingencies. Frankly, it's going on without words or gestures so you can't see it, but there's something of an epic magical duel going on between us as I counter all of his spells, and it's distracting. I can't slaughter the army below us while holding this guy helpless. So let's deal with him first."

In seconds their boyfriend had the betrayer stripped down to his loincloth. "The good thing about archmages is when you have to kill them, they generally have top notch loot," Jared chatted away happily. Then he held up a golden torc thingy. "Ooooh, cursed item. Always got to expect a few of those. Sort of like dying soldiers in war sometimes booby trap their bodies so a victorious enemy disturbing them gets a grenade to the face, it's very common for high level spellcasters to carry a few cursed objects as a "Revenge From Beyond The Grave" thingy. But! Through the wonders of the spell Greater Alchemistry, it's easy for me to change one magic item into another, including a cursed object," the golden torc he was holding suddenly shifted into a jeweled tiara, which he placed on Medivh's head, "into a different kind of item."

Lita blinked. "Did you just give him a magic item?"

"Yes," Jared agreed, gloatingly. "But it's not one he'll like. A Circlet of Forever isn't actually supposed to be a cursed item - just some of its effects are worse than most curses. You see, this guy heals more than three times faster than a troll. He just can't regrow limbs. That's why I'm strangling him, it's one of the few forms of harm he does not automatically recover from in seconds. But a Circlet of Forever stores life force collected from the wearer. Putting one on causes damage that can't be healed until the circlet is removed, and they can't be removed until it has stored an amount of life force equal to your maximum. So no matter how tough you are, one of these will bring you to the very brink of unconsciousness and death. It's inevitable, and there is no stopping it."

Then he rolled his eyes. "Of course, the downside is that once it's fully charged it can bring him back to life if he dies wearing it. But a fully charged circlet can be removed easily, so do that before killing him and we're good. And once a circlet is fully charged if anyone else but the guy who originally charged it puts it on, they get that first guy's total hit points added as a bonus to their own for as long as they wear it."

Jared had taken to holding the archmage upside down, so when the circlet dinged it fell off of the man's head instantly, and Jared caught it in one hand, while the formerly struggling archmage finally went limp in his other.

The redhead directed a triumphal gave towards his coterie. "The fun part is, once filled up the circlet stays filled forever, and as fast as this guy heals I can have him fill up a dozen of these - one for each of us, plus some spares. He has enough junk items I can do that."

"What would that mean?" Michelle moved a strand of wind-blown hair out of her eyes.

Jared smiled in return. "Well, for example by D&D rules an average human footsoldier has about four and a half hit points. Many orc subraces have bonuses that give them five and a half. A typical ogre has twenty six. By that same system this guy," he shook the recovering Medivh, "has four hundred and twenty hit points. That's on par with some of the avatars of the tougher major deities, and by charging up a circlet from him for each of you, we can add that on top of whatever your normal total might be."

The girls then proceeded to watch in shock and wonder as Jared repeatedly pressed onto Medivh a wide variety of cursed objects, placed similar circlets on his head one after another, then rammed his face into opened books.

Jared did not even bother countering Medivh efforts to recover from these curses and other disadvantages being inflicted on him. As these items stole away parts of Medivh's being, and Jared was, to use his own language, "Looting him for powerups." So to have enough to go around them all he had to let Medivh restore those abilities and powers he kept losing to the cursed objects.

A bit like milking a cow - if your cow was this fantastically powerful, evil archmage.

And yes, Jared was certain he could stop any chance of that evil corrupting them. He even began listing off the ways, but they were so technical he lost even Amy partway through the first explanation.

Jared pouted.

There was so much he wanted to explain! So much that was fun and interesting! Like how this guy had a template, Guardian of Tirisfal, that could have been *made* for the Sailor Moon characters! Actually, considering that it could have been written by a secret fan of the show and inserted as a tongue-in-cheek joke, it *might* have been written specifically to mimic the powers of the Sailor Scouts! And Jared wanted to explain the clever way he was arranging to bend half a dozen obscure rules to transfer that template to them so the girls would have those powers - among which was to be ageless, they would live as young and beautiful ladies forever unless killed.

Also, that template could only be granted to one person per planet, so he really was linking them to Mars, Venus, etc, in doing this.

What he really wanted to tell them about was the clever way he was combining obscure rules and seldom used loopholes to drain off the guy's experience and use it to create craft materials suitable for the creation of magic items - the very stuff they'd come here to buy. But even fellow gaming geeks might have trouble with that one unless he led them through it step by step with careful explanations along the way.

And even so, probably was that most DMs would immediately slam it with a ban-hammer.

But powerful, evil archmages have a habit of not staying killed. So to avoid any inevitable returns it was best if you could shrink them down to neophyte magic students who barely knew anything, as those were much more likely to stay dead.

So Jared choked the mage to unconsciousness a final time, sold off the guy's experience so that everything Medivh knew, all he'd learned, was lost, and in that act created mounds and piles of gold, jewels, ingots of rare metals, bolts of cloth, spools of thread, and stacks of reagents of unusual potency.

Everything they needed to create the costumes they'd come for.

As the girls immediately dived into the piles, using skills Leet's game taught them to begin work right away, forming shirts and skirts and other costume pieces in seconds as the magic of those skills took hold, Jared calmly snapped Medivh's neck, then sent the body to a place that it would not be coming back from, even if the archmage had been full power.

Leaving enemies to make inevitable returns was just all kind of a bad idea. Deal with them appropriately once, then you'll never have to face them again.

Thanks to a quirk of the Warcraft MMO (where people spend only a few seconds twiddling their thumbs for their craft skills to go from raw material to completed projects, that had translated to them knowing spells for how to cut and sew and so on) their little adventuring party were done crafting in only a couple of minutes, and stood there, floating in air, wearing whole outfits of the very best that topped-out craft skills could produce.

And, thanks to Leet's tweaks, they could craft some of the very best stuff in the game - items you'd usually be forced to spend months trawling top-ranked instances hoping for them to drop out of boss monsters. The most powerful cloth armor sets in the game.

Which prompted immediate response.

"Wow! This is UGLY!" Rae exclaimed, looking down at the sleeve on her arm.

"Yeah," Lita chimed in. "Was this designed by blind people, or something?"

"Ugly colors, ugly design," Mina agreed, also examining their new clothes minutely. "Who wears this stuff?"

"Do all tailors hate wizards, or something?" Lita looked distressed.

"Most tailors *are* wizards," Jared rebuffed softly.

"They could still hate themselves!" Holly chirped helpfully.

"I wouldn't buy curtains that looked like this, not if they were free," Michelle declared hotly, in a rare show of temper. "I am certainly unwilling to place myself in an outfit that looks like this. As capes we are supposed to have fans - ours would ridicule us."

Her gaze was demanding 'Fix this!'

"I also am unwilling to let this be my superheroine costume," Susan declared flatly, to which the rest chimed in their immediate agreement.

Seeing the disappointed faces surrounding him, Jared held up his hands in surrender. "Ok, it can be temporary. We'll change the looks when we enchant them D&D style. There we can pick whatever appearance we want. Until then, they can be disguised by covering over them with an illusion, or something."

"Can we look like Christmas Elves?" Serena burst out, appearing over his shoulder, and, sensing an acceptable escape, the rest also chimed in their agreement.

"Yes, we can do that," Jared agreed, readying his hands to cast.

Already considering that matter resolved, Lita had begun looking down toward the teeming swarms of orcs a mile below them crawling out of the giant teleport arch that was the warcraft world's Dark Portal. "So, are we just going to leave this world to be killed by orcs?" she asked, not sounding too happy about that at all.

Jared blinked. They really hadn't been there long. Two minutes making and handing cursed objects to Medivh. Another minute spent making and donning the costumes, then magically disguising them so they all looked like Christmas costumes - with the girls basically wearing illusionary copies of the outfit he'd worn during his brief stint as the Christmas Elf.

The orc hordes below hadn't marched more than a couple of hundred feet during that time, and more were pouring out of the Dark Portal all of the time. Their army already stretched across half of the valley the immense arch stood in.

"Well, this actually has a couple of easy solutions," Jared quipped, looking downwards. "In the first place, the stones of Stonehenge aren't all that much bigger than a man, but weigh so much no one yet has come up with a definitive answer as to how stone age men could have moved them to where they are. The stones of this Dark Portal form a similar arch, but are roughly as large as medium size skyscrapers. Their weight must be immense. So..."

He shot off a quick chant and the Dark Portal vanished. Sprays of mud filled the air, some even up as high as they were.

The boy chuckled. "Cast a spell of Transmute Rock To Mud on the valley floor beneath that Dark Portal, and its own weight sinks it instantly. Using Elvan High Magic I even sank that thing a full mile under the surface. Now I reverse the spell..."

The sprays of mud hardened, and became a hail of massive stones, crushing the life out of countless orcs caught below.

Jared was clearly amused. "The strategy was actually pioneered by a group of human slaves to free themselves of their alien masters in the Stargate universe - bury the portal, and any fool unfortunate enough to come through that portal becomes an instant fossil." He directed an amused gaze to his girls. "Closing the Dark Portal never seems to help this world; someone always just reopens it. This should prove much more effective."

A few mile-radius Cloudkill spells filled the valley floor with greenish vapors, killing off virtually every orc that had not already been sucked underground by the sinking portal or crushed under the weight of falling rocks, leaving only a few of the leaders who were tough enough to resist the poisonous fumes.

In seconds two or three million orcs had been reduced to four or six thousand - who suddenly and inexplicably began to roar and carve up each other with axes.

Jared was smiling as he explained. "The spell of Racial Confusion makes one forget what race they really are, and imagine they are some other. Now on a race that did not hate anyone, all it would do is engender a little confusion, as a gnome tried to behave as what he thinks an elf or a dwarf might. Good for a harmless prank, but nothing more. On the other hand, cast on a race famous for its pathological hatred for just about every other race out there, and they react with violence."

The redhead turned an amused gaze on his friends. "Fitting, no? If their first impulse wasn't to kill every race not their own this wouldn't be causing them any issue. And unlike the previous poison gas, which only the tough survive (and orcs are rather famously tough), this is a mind-affecting spell, which can only be resisted by high degrees of self-control - which barbaric creatures like orcs are infamous for their lack of."

"Won't some still resist?" Rae piped up, obviously curious as to the workings of the spell.

"Yeah." He responded simply. "And those few are down there surrounded by rampaging orcs who want to cut their heads off. Does it matter if they resisted the spell? They are still going to fight, just to survive, if nothing else."

OoOoO

They'd been gone five minutes.

Two minutes looting Medivh, another minute on costumes, then two more minutes until the orc armies had been reduced to where they could finish them off via aerial bombardment. Yet when they returned, after another slog through the wall of tar mid-teleport, it was to find the downtown district of Brockton Bay broken, and the Endbringer sirens already wailing.

The press of Christmas shoppers had vanished, and all across downtown, buildings were smashed, purchases lay dropped and left where they had fallen as people abandoned any other concern in their race to get to shelters. Beams of light crisscrossed the devastation and explosions rocked the area as some capes ran by on super speed, others flew, and all did battle with...

...an enormous, and hugely distorted, anthropomorphic truck.

~Ok,~ Jared pursed his lips. ~So the local guys aren't all that hot at dealing with youma.~

The rest of the city seemed fine, and the rampage had not spread that far. Most of the time the truck youma spent obviously looking for something - probably them, unless Jared missed his guess by a very wide margin, as it had not wandered far from where it last saw them, still searching, pausing only occasionally to swat away heroes.

Really, youma from the Sailor Moon universe were fairly simple, overall. They were disposable minions whose existence centered around stealing human energy and getting it to the bad guys. The only things they really had going for them were a general immunity to nonmagical weapons (thus forcing cute little magical girls to fight them, as opposed to, say, the police or the army), and a special attack or two.

But they weren't bright, so tended to need someone to give them orders - something that this example obviously didn't have, as it was obviously still trying to follow its previous set, "Attack the Sailor Scouts" even without there being any Scouts present.

This became obvious when, on sighting Serena's friends out of the corner of its eye, the youma immediately abandoned what it had been doing, straightened up, and charged right at them - flattening two or three other heroes who'd happened to be in its way.

Luckily, now those girls had dozens of hours of combat practice thanks to Leet's simulation, so this sudden charge did nothing to upset them, or throw them off their game. They just began to execute the appropriate responses.

Serena led the pack, dismissing her flying reindeer so she could cast spells, dropping the last two dozen feet as nothing to her anymore, and, since her shields were already up (really, like most mages, they wouldn't go to bed at night without having freshly cast their shields first), conjuring her Water Elemental guardian even as she fell.

Either Serena had odd luck, and somehow fumbled her summoning that got contagious and spread to the rest of the girls, or it was just an inexplicable fit of holiday spirit on the part of the elemental itself, because the water elementals they'd summoned appeared as large snowmen instead, complete with top hats and coal for eyes.

Yeah, weird. Jared had no explanation for that one.

He did, however, lay down a Freeze Trap in the youma's path - which it ignored, running straight into it, and freezing in a block of solid ice that would hold it immobile for a second or two.

The Brockton Bay heroes were already responding, blasters laying down a withering barrage of fire, brutes chasing after the truck-youma to reengage their target, search and rescue flitting around dragging out bodies of those run over by the charge, and the rest of the fight reorienting back to center on the subject of their fight.

Jared, in full Santa regalia (the girls insisted), marked the youma with a mystic symbol floating over its head to increase the effectiveness of the ranged attacks against it, then waded in.

Really, as the girls were all mages, glass cannons the lot of them, he, who'd practiced every class, was the only one fit to tank this thing. So he brought up a paladinish aura to increase the protections of all allies present, threw some debuffs on the enemy, then got ready to rumble.

The ice shattered on the expected moment, and he was already hitting the youma with a Taunt ability that guaranteed it focused on him for a while.

But instead of the MMO trick, where you just hit a button, he found his body acting without his direction, and words coming out of his mouth he hadn't put in there!

OoOoO

Clockblocker fought sometimes for his humor, but the right gag at the right time kept his friends and teammates focused on groaning over his puns, instead of focusing on the pants-wetting terror they sometimes should be feeling.

"Tell Santa I want a refund!" He joked as he and the other Wards debarked from the PRT vans transporting them to the site of the attack. "I would have chosen just about anything for Christmas over an Endbringer attack in the heart of our home town."

Silence.

Dang! Vista would have slapped him for that one, but Aegis was out of reach and Regent just didn't care.

Not even Shadow Stalker snarled at him, and she was usually easy to get a reaction out of.

Downtown was smashed, and with only four minutes on the clock since this attack started not many heroes were in town yet. Even with teleporters ferrying groups in it sometimes took hours to gather everyone who was willing to contribute from around the globe, but already this Christmas season had lost any signs of being a merry one.

Technically, the Wards shouldn't even be in Endbringer fights. But directors often 'forgot' to ask if anyone volunteered and just sent everyone to the front, especially when it was their own city under attack.

Director Piggot, or as he preferred to call her, Miss Piggy, had already taken a helicopter out of town, along with most of her key administrative staff, the people who'd be hardest to replace if lost. The capes excepted, of course. They got left behind, expected to engage the monster long enough for out-of-town reinforcements to arrive.

Clockblocker, as a cape who could freeze anyone in time by touch for a random but small number of minutes, would normally have felt this a heroic, if somewhat tragic, responsibility and been alright with it, if that didn't put him on exactly the same level as the goblins.

Nilbog's creations, the goblins used as security around every PRT headquarters these days, were told "Today, all humans are 'Friend'," and being used in an almost identical sacrificial attack. They'd already been trucked in and were off charging this new Endbringer in a wave of monstrous flesh.

That, too, Clockblocker would have appreciated a great deal more if his orders hadn't amounted to exactly the same thing, "Run in and touch it," when he had no special defenses and was just as vulnerable as an ordinary human.

Some days it was harder than others to keep his humor up.

Psyching himself up, he stepped out of the paltry and inadequate protection of the PRT truck and looked over at their opponent.

He blinked, looked back at the truck he'd just stepped out of, then over again at the vaguely human-shaped truck that was their newest endbringer. "Am I missing something, or does this new endbringer look like it deserves the name: Ford?"

"Shut up and attack it!" came the voice of an aggravated adult over the Wards' private line - which meant it was some kind of commander, so it was time to do or die. Clockblocker sighed. With a new Endbringer they didn't know anything about its powers or weaknesses, so that left them in a state of, 'Throw everything at it and see if anything sticks.'

He just wished he was of more value than a spitball, that's all.

Clockblocker accepted an armband passed out by the PRT guy low enough on the totem pole to be sent out to the battle zone to distribute the things, and clipped it on, already expecting the depressing toll of capes dead or down to have reached a more or less constant stream on the announcement channel, as with all other attacks he'd heard of.

In this, he was pleasantly surprised, as the casualty toll was so far rather slim, as if this new endbringer was not even trying - which probably meant it was hiding something. The Simurgh's first appearance had been something like that, no violence at all until they'd learned too late that it just wanted to drive entire cities insane, reprogramming entire population centers into murder-happy sleeper agents.

Yeah, endbringer attacks just made it so easy to focus on the positive - NOT!

Clockblocker was setting himself up, judging the combat so he could move forward in stages and eventually get set to rush the thing in a probably futile attack when the endbringer shifted, suddenly charging off in nearly the opposite direction. The Wards' eyes shifted to see who or what the new target was, and Clockblocker found himself straightening up out of his crouch and blinking as he saw Santa Claus and about ten Christmas Elves descending on flying reindeer.

Santa hit the ground first, and closest to the creature. He laid a present on the ground before him and backed off while his elves summoned... man-sized snowmen?

Then the endbringer hit the present and was suddenly frozen in a towering block of solid ice. Clockblocker knew he'd never get a better chance, and was running before his mind had even processed what his legs were doing.

Nobody stopped an endbringer for long. Nobody. And if this block was only going to last a few seconds, that still gave Clockblocker the best chance he was ever going to have to position himself to make his own run - and he was going to use it.

But miraculously Santa didn't back off, just standing there exuding Christmas cheer as the seconds passed away before the endbringer inevitably broke free.

Only serious brutes stood up to an endbringer for even a few seconds. For anyone with any experience the rule was hit and run, do what you can, then get clear. Only Santa wasn't moving, and Clockblocker's legs didn't stop pumping as he stopped merely jockeying for position and transitioned straight into a charge towards the endbringer - which broke out before he was even halfway there!

But the jolly old elf did not appear concerned at all, taking a candy cane from out of his sack and using that as a hook around the endbringer's neck to drag it down so it faced him nose-to-nose.

"Ho! Ho! Ho! But I'm not here to talk about your mother's profession!"

Santa then directed an uppercut into the creature's chin that lifted it off the pavement.

Clockblocker's jaw nearly hit the street as he stopped and stared in shock.

OoOoO

Author's Notes:

Yes, youma are insanely durable by any nonmagical standard. So you get an engine of destruction going on a rampage throughout the city, that turns out to be insanely durable, and the local pattern that fits most closely is endbringer, so they'd call it that and hit the sirens.

As for where the youma come from? Weeell, Jared Needed Worthy Opponents, so has a few Endbringers of his very own, created solely for the purpose of destroying him, and focused on just that, with no other interests.

Creating superpowered youma to send after him lies entirely within the scope and scale of Endbringer abilities. Its first appearance also would have been a totally overwhelming attack had he not already been going as hard as he could for the most powerful abilities he could find. And I had their first strike on him be a month early, just to be extra unfair to him.

Sending out youma to attack does not even put that particular Endbringer in any danger, so even if he can deal with the youma, he can't yet stop the problem, having no way to reach or even find the source. For convenience sake, we shall call that youma-creating Endbringer Beryl, for reasons that ought to be obvious.

Hey, when you spend a point on Companions, recall they might just bring a bit of their theme along with them.


	11. Chapter 11

Stepping on Worm  
Chapter Eleven

by Skysaber  
aka Perfect Lionheart

OoOoO

"Fear Not! For MUCUS MAN is here to save the day!"

"Oh no!" half a dozen masked capes at the Chicago gathering point groaned in unison.

Every city knew when the Endbringer sirens went off the Endbringer Truce went into effect. That meant an end to business as usual, no cape-on-cape battles anywhere at all. Heroes would not hunt or try to arrest villains, and villains could walk right into any PRT HQ or police station without fear. He could even get a cup of coffee and chat with the persons in charge of hunting him, if he wanted.

The government did this as the only practical way to get villains involved in the fights with Endbringers - and it did not take much statistical analysis to prove if they did not get villains to attend, it would only be heroes doing all of the dying, and pretty soon there would be no capes left but the villains.

Every PRT station had the same protocol. They'd select a point where capes could gather to, and be placed in a schedule to be teleported anywhere in the world they needed to go in order to fight the Endbringer.

Yet despite everything there was a bottleneck. There were only a few capes who could teleport, and even fewer who could carry groups or had long enough range to be useful, so even with the best organization they could arrange, often groups still had to wait to be picked up.

The villains who showed up for those fights had the law go a lot easier on them, earning them a much lower slot on anyone's priority list to hunt, and should they get caught the courts generally went far softer on them for any crimes they'd committed.

Risking your life for others' benefit deserved to be rewarded. But the government would consider any incentive at all that could actually get the villains to those fights, as experience had shown they needed hundreds of capes to drive off Endbringers, and the casualties they took doing so were staggering.

Besides, with casualties as bad as they were, they typically didn't need to go all that hard on villains showing up to Endbringer battles, as tombstones were cheaper than jail cells.

But there were times when that policy of "Any cape can attend, no matter their record," were harder to bear than others.

It was one thing to look a mass murderer in the eye and thank him for attending, while secretly hoping that this one not be among those who made it back. It was another to shake hands with a drug dealer knowing your life might depend upon his participation and support. But then there were others...

"Ewww!" Constance could not help or suppress her shudder of disgust at this newest arrival.

"What's the matter?" one of the Chicago Wards, a Changer if Constance recalled right, asked, genuinely curious as behind her the yellow-brown and green costumed hero tried to make himself welcome while most of his audience cringed away in disgust.

"Kid, you never heard about Mucus Man?" a nearby black parahuman in a red costume asked, amused.

"It's never come up in her training," Constance returned. Then, on seeing the ward was looking to her for enlightenment, shuddered again. "I don't like to talk about it."

The black man was not so restrained. In fact, he looked heartily amused as he threw himself into the role of instructor she'd just vacated. "Kid, that cape right there," he pointed out Mucus Man, "was one of the early triggers. He's been in the cape business nearly thirty years - and that ain't no small feat! Triggered when he was only ten years old, o' course back then he was known as Booger Boy," he let out a hearty laugh. "I'm surprised you've never heard of him - his power lets him generate nearly limitless quantities of snot!"

The ward's face showed fresh revulsion, while Constance struggled hard to control her disgust and beat down her body's reflexive shudders.

"Funny thing is," the black cape continued genially. "Is that if you can take the gross factor he's one of the nicest heroes there is: kind, polite, always ready to help out at charities, and he *always* comes to these things. Mucus Man may also be the most powerful hero the US has got."

That came close to being the unvarnished truth, Constance thought, fighting to control her urge to vomit as a light spray of mucus swept over the area at something Mucus Man did - her back was turned, so she couldn't tell exactly what.

Not like it mattered, as *everything* that cape did generated snot! And, she regretfully had to admit the unfortunate comment about his power levels was right on target, as well.

"But that ain't got much to do about him. 'Course you know about the 500 lb gorilla, right?" the black cape asked the ward, who when she shook her head the black cape feigned surprise. "Girl, what kinda things they teachin' you in that wards program? That joke's an old one. It goes like this: Where does a 500 lb gorilla sit?"

When the ward shook her head in confusion, the older cape leaned in close to answer his own question, "Anywhere he wants to!"

Feeling jovial, the red-costumed cape continued jabbering on, "Monopoly of Force - it's a thing. Congress got too used to bein' the *only* one on the block with a Big Stick! Got too used to gettin their way on virtually anythang. Then capes came along, and suddenly power was less jets and missiles, and more being able to build super-gadgets out of household appliances, or go all Stranger-like and invisible your way past hotel security where a nice, juicy congressman might just wait to be kidnapped and held for ransom."

The jovial cape shrugged. "So they did what they always did - passed a law that gave them what they want, and it said 'if you own a power, we own you. So show up and put your dog collars on'." A very wide and toothy grin followed that statement. "Turned out not to be all that popular a law, for some reason."

Constance had resolutely turned her back to where Mucus Man had inadvertently stuck two capes together, and was making progress on controlling her urge to vomit. Focusing on this conversation helped, for some reason. And it was true, what he'd said. Ten years after parahumans started to appear congress passed the Mandatory Registration Act for anyone with superpowers, and it had been an unmitigated disaster.

Comparisons to Jews and the holocaust had been made, some scarily accurate ones, too.

"Now the thing about slaves," the black parahuman preached with some authority, "is to get 'em that way they gotta be powerless - they gotta be! 'Cause if they had any power, they'd use it to not be slaves.

"Now congress had the Police, National Guard, Army, the Air Force, and what's the common man going to do against all of that? Nothing! So he gotta sit there and take it when congress does some lame-ass thing. But the parahumans? They turned out to be that 500 lb gorilla I was talking about. They could do anything they wanted. Some wanted to fight back - turns out we had a whole heap of a lot of infrastructure that was crazy easy for them to blow up, and a whole lot of newly offended Tinkers and Thinkers told 'join up or else' by the government started looking for just those weak points. Nearly destroyed the country.

"After DC went more than two months without electricity, got more than half the power plants in the country blowed up, more than a few oil refineries on fire, half the bridges down and more than a few dams busted, at last someone with an ounce of sense went and told congress - 'you ain't winning, so kindly don't bring everyone else down with you.' That guy was Heartbreaker, and he done saved the country."

And that was not the worst of it, Constance thought to herself, struggling to breathe more evenly. Yes, it turns out that telling a bunch of people with a supernatural affinity for technology to serve you or else, when your life and livelihood depended on the smooth functioning of that technology, had been one of the greatest blunders in congressional history. But that hadn't been the only casualty to that incredible display of egotism.

No, infrastructure could be fixed. They were doing it. What could not be replaced so easily was all of those good people who'd lost faith that their country was looking out for their best interests. So, just like when France had decided that rich people didn't need money, so decided to take nearly all of it via taxes (and it was so bad everyone who qualified for those new tax rates left the country before that law took effect), most of the heroes, the more powerful ones anyway, simply emigrated off to greener pastures and got welcomed by countries who desperately needed them.

Powerful people had options that people without power did not, and that was true whether that power got measured in wealth, or anything else.

The Chicago branch of the Protectorate had once been led by a cape who named himself Merlin (or close enough, it might have been one of those odd spellings, Constance could not recall exactly), who'd been probably the most powerful hero in the country. Already working for the government, it had been a rude shock to congress when he'd quit in disgust rather than enforce their law, and left for England - where they'd received him with joy, and celebrated his emulating a revered figure out of their ancient mythic history, rather than the mockery and derision he'd faced in the States over claiming his powers were magical.

Who knew? It's not like the scientists understood how powers worked, yet. And after thirty years of study, to not know anything looks kind of bad. But not knowing what they *were* certainly gave them no room to say what they were *not*, so the magic theory was not as ridiculed as it had once been.

But the black cape was already continuing, "Anyway, when it was all over, most of the best heroes in the cape business had either left the country or gone villain. Earned the US a heap of bad publicity, too, all of those foreign countries saying that we'd tried to reintroduce slavery - most of them saying that in hopes they'd get more of our capes running over to join them, of course. But it had an unfortunate ring of truth to it as well, I reckon, as those congressmen weren't keepin anyone's rights in mind but their own as they did it. Woulda done them better if they had thought about it, as only four of them congresscritters lived long enough to see their law repealed. Turns out there's a whole category of capes called 'Strangers' most of whom could walk right past ordinary security, and made downright terrifying assassins when motivated enough - and as it turns out, threatening to enslave people is powerful motivation for them to stop ya."

The black man shook his head. "Whole thing ended more political careers than anything else I could think of. But it left a bit of a power vacuum that sticks around even today."

And at the word "Stick" an unfortunate coincidence occurred, where Mucus Man accidentally stuck someone to the roof with a huge glob of snot.

The black cape fixed the ward with a steady eye, ignoring the disgusting 'schlurk' sound going on behind him as that trapped cape pulled free of the mess. "See, some of the most powerful capes in the world? Most of the most powerful triggers? They're the old ones. Being around for a while means they done got a bit clever, too. Learned them a trick or two. And people like that? They don't like getting pushed around none, you hear? So they left, and what got left behind were what most folks considered second rate - and not even a lot of them. Same rule applies in business - if you oppress your employees, the ones most capable of finding other jobs will, leaving you with the dregs. And having only the dregs does not make for the best business - or the best country."

The black cape shrugged. "So in the span of a couple of months, the USA went from a world power, and arguably *the* world leader, to something less than Spain in prominence. Every country I can think of has their ways to neutralize our best capes, while, thanks to congress sticking the country's foot so deep in their mouths they can kick themselves in the balls with it, we ain't got nothing and nobody what can do the same in return."

It hadn't always been that bad, Constance thought to herself. At first, the USA had not been any more or less powerful in the capes they could put forth than the rest of the major countries - excepting China and Russia, of course. But Tian Shu Zhu and Lady Winter were off-the-charts powerful. No one felt good when comparing their capes to those two.

So the top, Tier Zero, were Tian Shu Zhu and Lady Winter. No one else even came close. Anyone who even tried to compete with that ended up sorry. If they lived through it.

On the level below them were the Tier One capes. Originally Tian Shu Zhu and Lady Winter had been listed there, until it became clear they operated on a completely different level. But still, the most powerful capes in the world, aside from them, were Tier One.

"See, China also has the Chairman," the black cape rolled his shoulders, obviously chatting away just to make the time they had to wait for transport to go faster. "He'd been a nobody. Ain't had no prospects in life, no education, and most of his family died of overwork in the sweatshops there producing cheap junk for the Walmart chain. But then he done triggered with one of the most powerful Master abilities in the world - anyone under the sound of his voice had to obey his orders. Even if those orders were self-destructive or suicidal."

He winked at the Ward. "All radio and TV broadcasts out of China got banned overnight."

That had literally been true, Constance thought. Nor had it been the end of it. It had taken another week for all audio recordings out of China to be stopped utterly by international treaty, forcing the record and movie companies to get their cheap CDs to be printed elsewhere, as even a simple exercise video might have new commands spliced in.

"Lucky for the world, The Chairman don't speak no English." The black cape chattered. "Best we can figure, he speaks nothing but Chinese - his own dialect at that. Still didn't stop him from taking over his home country, of course. But since no one except Russia is crazy enough to try to mess around with China, that ain't made too much of a difference on the world stage as yet. Course, everyone's all afraid of what happens when it does," he finished much more softly, revealing that he was not without those fears himself.

Another shrug. "Official speculation has it that The Chairman gets tolerated by Tian, as The Chairman's efforts keep the country together well enough to provide Tian with armies."

Armies which seemed to be all that cape was interested in, Constance commented in the privacy of her own thoughts. No need to scare the Wards listening in, though (as now more than one were paying attention to this impromptu lesson).

Because the next step on that train of thought was positively pants-wetting to all of the analysts that had thought on it: What happened once Russia or China got done with each other? Those Tier Zero capes, interested in nothing but war? Turned loose on the rest of the world?

More than a few people had contemplated suicide when commanded to plan through such a scenario.

"Course Russia has their own answer to China's Chairman, and like him this one was also born a nobody with nothin in life but a whole lot of hardship and toil ahead of him. But once his powers came in he'd put himself in charge of the entire country (save for the parts Lady Winter wanted, of course). This one got everyone to call him The Premier, and is the world's strongest Blaster, able to fire lasers that bend around corners, freeze what they hit, and other thangs that make no sense. But he can defeat whole armored regiments pretty easy."

Yes, Constance admitted privately to herself, no one yet had managed to document all of The Premier's abilities with those light beams. Also, in light of those two countries, the rest of the world was left feeling somewhat lightweight by contrast.

What was left of India had Kali, named after their goddess of destruction, an invulnerable flying cape with super strength. Germany had Der Fuehrer, possible the most powerful Tinker on the planet and producing what seemed an endless supply of secret war machines in a disturbing real-life reflection of 50's style pulp fiction.

Still, Germany had been invaded by Russia, and even though attacking Europe was only a side interest for Lady Winter, she would have conquered it long ago without some nation there having their own super-capable cape to hold her at bay. It was rumored they'd even found a way to clone Der Fuehrer and had hundreds of him producing inventions.

Even so, twenty years ago, during the United States' troubles, Germany had put out a call to anyone willing to help out to come to their defense - and they'd gotten a lot of freaks, nuts and Neo-Nazis, including not a few capes (some of which insisted on wearing WWII Nazi uniforms as their costumes).

So Nazis vs the Soviet Union, Round Two was going on over there.

Europe had quickly fallen into two camps: the Russians or the Germans. The UK would have been overrun by one side or the other just like the rest except they had Lord British, who was some kind of Thinker, and powerful enough that not only had he singlehandedly gotten the UK's economy, infrastructure and manufacturing going again (something that Teacher and Accord still struggled with over here), but he had enough spare brain cycles left over to keep his country independent.

They had to fight for that, sometimes daily. But so far Lord British had been equal to the task of keeping that country's head above water. Which, in light of German war machines and Lady Winter's planning, was nothing short of a miracle.

But perhaps the biggest name among the Tier One capes in the world was Pharaoh. Like most capes, little was known about him. It was suspected that he was of the Hutu tribe of Rwanda, as he'd certainly participated on their side of the Rwanda Genocide, personally killing hundreds of thousands of people. After that he'd engaged in a brutal campaign of ethnic cleansing over all of Africa , eliminating whole tribes, driving both white men and Arabs completely out of Africa.

Then he'd topped that off by claiming all of that continent as his own personal domain.

After a few attempts to dislodge him, people were now too scared to disagree. So in boredom the world's most powerful Trump (it was widely said that Pharaoh had any power he wanted, and often more than one at once) had reshaped Mt. Kilimanjaroh using his powers into his own personal pyramid, and hollowed it out to serve as a royal palace. Now it was said that every day at dawn he ascended to the top to challenge the world, that if any brave men remained in it, to come fight him.

Constance didn't know. She only cared that Pharaoh was good about showing up for Endbringer battles. It seemed he relished in the challenge they gave to him.

One thing she did know, was that the United States was *very* unhappy to be losing the Cape Arms Race, but they just didn't have anyone who could compete on the level as those countries that hadn't driven off their best and brightest.

They were lucky to get third rate capes on board the Protectorate.

So caught up she'd been in her own thoughts, that Constance had missed several minutes of the conversation. She was brought back as an elephant-sized snot bubble popped loudly, spraying their whole area.

"Mucus Man over there was one of the few who came back, and while he might only be second rate by the world's standards, he's among the strongest we got, and old enough to have got a bit clever, too."

"If only he weren't so DISGUSTING!" Constance cried aloud in misery.

OoOoO

In a desolate dimension, off in a section of otherwise unoccupied space, with no Earth even in sight to the naked eye, floated a vaguely humanoid thing.

Though it had two arms and two legs, the proportions were all wrong to be human, more a distortion, the sort of mockery of the humanoid form that could really only arise from the mind of a horror artist than anything real.

Nevertheless, it floated there, uncaring of the cold of space or the lack of atmosphere. And though it gave no outward sign, it was watching, scrying a not-too distant dimension, for there its target lay, a creature that it had been created to destroy.

Humans would eventually, when they learned of it, give this remarkably inhuman humanoid form the name of Beryl, and call it an Endbringer, which was true, as its siblings already active had earned that name more than a hundred times over in the cities and lives they had destroyed.

The entity known as Lady Winter had spat it out quite recently, created as a countermeasure for something they could not detect. Beryl's sole purpose was to scan, to probe without risking herself, and ultimately to destroy (the preferred option) or to gather data on something that threatened the space whales' plan to destroy this Earth and all dimensional counterparts of it and feast on the remains.

Something that had already killed two shards, along with their gathered knowledge.

Beryl was stretched, like an NBA player gone horribly wrong, with one side unequal to the other. It was only vaguely female seeming, something you had to squint at and say "ehhh, kinda", and its colors were purple and red, blotched together without rhyme or reason. Nevertheless, it floated, uncaring of its own shape or dimensions, all of its attentions focused on another place and time where heroes and villains did battle with one of her creations.

The Simurgh had telekinesis and both pre- and postcognition. Behemoth had dynakinesis and burrowing, while Leviathan had super speed and hydrokinesis. Beryl's talents lay in scrying and creating projections. She never had to enter a battlefield herself. She could throw her awareness a thousand planes of reality away, and use whatever she found there to create remote puppets with quasi-Endbringer properties to serve as her minions.

Already there were some who called them youma. This bothered Beryl none, for she cared not what they called her or her projections. Her youma projections had not the full durability nor power of a true Endbringer, more like a true Endbringer's arm or leg, which considering that humans had never destroyed even that much off of her siblings was still tough enough.

No, what mattered was they served well enough, and were totally disposable, for the creature she fought and was created to destroy was presumed capable of incredible violence, as two shards had already been lost to it before Beryl had even been made.

Another two shards had been lost quite recently, within the last several Earth minutes, dying and taking all of their data with them - forcing this Endbringer to go active.

Though it was a low priority target, while the entities scanned nearby dimensional space for a rival space whale, Beryl was investigating the physical location on Earth where the local life forms who had been linked to the now-dead shards had been located.

She investigated the only way she knew how. Her creators were not an imaginative race, so she sent in one of her projections and attacked the place, hoping to force a response.

Probability of success to this line of research was extremely low, as the shards used more protections on those links than could conveniently be described, and refined those until it was frankly the least likely avenue of attack for them to be damaged.

But however pathetic and unlikely a clue that may have been, Beryl had no other, and so would investigate it.

Watching the battle, Beryl's attentions suddenly spiked, as she read from the postures and actions of most of those prey-animal humans down there that they were reacting to something that she herself could not detect.

Anything that could hide from her scanning earned status as a high priority target. She sent her youma in at once. Then, almost immediately, something froze the youma for vital seconds - something that she could not perceive, then once again this undetectable force yanked the head portion of her youma down to approximately human eye level.

Beryl's interests grew feral indeed.

OoOoO

Santa's blow lifted the Endbringer into the air.

Then, as if it had been planned, nearly a dozen blasts of energy met it there. The Christmas Elves struck it as a coordinated group, with more or less random contributions by some others. Blasts of fire, ice and other energy hit so strongly as to illuminate the Endbringer for a moment, frozen in the air, before blasting away in a terrific explosion, actually stripping off several layers of the Endbringer's flesh.

No one present had ever seen an Endbringer damaged so deeply in a single volley.

Crashing to the ground, the vehicle youma levered itself to where it could glare at its new opponents, outer tissues already regenerating as wounds healed.

Another round of energy blasts descended onto it, lifting the monster off of the ground and throwing it into the air.

Unfortunately for all present, it landed on its feet a short distance away none the worse for wear. The attacks that had damaged it so deeply on the first attempt had reset its damage back before its precious last few seconds of regeneration, but it was no worse off than what had been done by the first strike.

And it laughed.

"Ah ha ha ha! Backfire has you now!"

The monster then bent over, extending a tail pipe from its rear end, whereupon thick, black, oily smoke began to issue forth at an impossible rate, suddenly filling blocks around it with an impenetrable bank of greasy, black, and foul-smelling smog.

The next blow caught Santa under the chin and lifted him off of his feet.

OoOoO

Construct.

Landing and rolling away from the follow-up stomp that would have crushed and pulverized his head, the word went through Jared's head as he kipped up and the youma took another swing at him.

Stopping time again quickly, for only a short burst this time and just for himself, he healed up his injuries quickly and began to put up more buffs around himself while considering his options.

Of the many creature types in D&D constructs stood out as among the most unusual - not unusual in the sense that you didn't meet any, but in a world with dragons and undead they managed to stand out as being somewhat odd, unlike any other creature type out there.

It meant a creature that was neither living nor dead - something built or created instead of born or grown. Robots were a prime example, as were animated statues of clay, the classic golem out of fairy tale and myth.

Which, considering that both games he'd drawn his powers from were based on those same fairy tales and myths, meant he'd faced quite a few of them, had even built some himself from time to time.

Actually, the reason he'd identified this youma as one so quickly was that he had taken abilities specialized in the creation of constructs, and knew their functions so intimately that he could not help but realize what he was fighting almost as soon as the first blows were flung.

Now Jared had cataloged a significant portion of its strengths and weaknesses just as easily and quickly as a car nut could rattle off engine and performance figures for his favorite make and model. And, drinking down a potion they'd taken off of Medivh right before time resumed, Jared was following that up with a Know Vulnerabilities spell as he dodged its probing attacks moments later.

It hadn't got many.

Oh, sure, the thing was blind, deaf and could not smell or taste. It had none of the ordinary human suite of senses, but even without the thick, cloying black cloud of smog it had just expelled that was as much an advantage as anything, as that made it very difficult to affect with whole suites of common distractions, debuffs, and methods of concealment.

Now, as suddenly no one else was able to see, it held a substantial advantage.

Actually, Jared realized as he stepped inside of and dodged yet another crushing blow, it was far worse even than that, as the smog wasn't just blocking vision. From the gasps and the coughs he was hearing, it was also filling up the lungs, and choking everybody within it.

That suddenly switched the battle around from 'All of Us Vs You' to 'One on One', as Jared was the only one present that he knew of that didn't need to breathe.

One of those tricks he'd been meaning to show the Sailor Scouts when he was getting them up to speed that they quite simply hadn't had time for yet.

Glory Girl made a run, passing through the smog at what was probably maximum velocity for her, managing somehow to punch the Endbringer on her way past. The boy dressed up as Santa could also sense Velocity, a speedster, was rushing in and out of the smog bank playing Search and Rescue, pulling out the choking people before they could all become casualties.

Jared was also noticing, and rather displeased with the information, that this youma's blows had increased in accuracy against him significantly since spreading the smog cloud - which meant the thing probably had some kind of sense tied to controlling the smog and was thus able to sense inside of it much like a spider could feel out across its web.

Lovely.

He hadn't nailed down quite how this thing sensed the world around it, but he could tell right off the bat that spells of Blindness, and the like, were totally useless on it, as was Darkness and surprise flashes of light.

It probably would not even sense most illusions, either. So loads of tools for dealing with a superior opponent simply did not apply here, shrinking the available dirty tricks by quite a large portion. Entire categories of spells were useless on it.

On the other hand, from the way it had been flailing about before, he could tell that whatever it was using as substitute for the five ordinary senses could not pick him up before it had spread out its smog bank - most probably due to one of the many counters for divination and scrying abilities included in his Archmage's Defensive Spell Suite.

That meant if he could get rid of its smog he would be effectively invisible to the thing, which was a powerful advantage - an advantage that right now was working for his enemy, as it could sense him just fine, but he stood there entirely without the bank of DPS support he'd been tanking for, since the Blasters and other capes could not see inside, rendering them ineffectual at best.

Another blow crashed into him, catching him on the belt of his Santa suit and folding him in half by the waist, when Jared cast another Time Stop to recover, both healing himself as well as collecting his wits.

Casting a spell, he brought a small, woody nut into existence, which he ate with some difficulty, first sucking on the thing, then at last swallowing it whole when his teeth proved ineffectual against its shell. Fortunately, whether he chewed or not didn't seem to matter as he felt a flush of magic arise from his core and go clear through to his skin.

Now at least he wouldn't need to heal as often with the Tough Nut affecting him.

Time resumed, and he stepped around the youma's ankle, tripping it in the way past with his cane. As it struggled to rise, he caught a fresh moment to hit the monster with yet another divination spell.

The results brought an instant smile to his face.

"Well," the jolly elf succumbed to the urge to laugh. "Now I know what to get you for Christmas."

OoOoO

Author's Notes:

The source author, in his insanity, decided that true Endbringers were 200 layers thick (their limbs only being 30), with the outermost layer starting out as dense as metal, and that density doubling at each layer thereafter.

Someone did the math, concluding that would give Endbringers as much mass as an entire galaxy. But rather than be embarrassed, the source author embraced this wholeheartedly and endorsed it, proving that he and physics got along about as well as vampires and garlic.

One wonders how he was even able to pass the third grade.

But whatever. He spewed it. That means that we, who write stories in this universe, have to deal with it. Some deal with it by taking the totally sensible option of ignoring it, some retcon through their own rules... I'll just curbstomp it as he presented it, with no apologies made.

Because he embraced having enormous mass as a total cure-all, and it really isn't.

A human may have enormous mass contrasted to a bee, but can still die to its sting. A craft weighing in at tens of thousands of tons can easily be disabled, or even destroyed, by a small computer error that amounts to a few photons being out of place.

Anyway, due to this chapter those of you who have followed the Worm series (shame on you! Have you no sense?) have now got the information to tell where several of the former Cauldron shards went, and naturally that dandruff falling in different places has changed the geopolitical climate somewhat.


	12. Chapter 12

Stepping on Worm  
Chapter Twelve

by Skysaber  
aka Perfect Lionheart

OoOoO

Jared was grinning, as thanks to his latest spell he knew how this youma's defenses worked, and therefore *exactly* how to defeat it.

And then suddenly, with a giant "SPLUT!" the world went yellow-green.

Yeah. It wasn't the nice kind of yellow-green, either. In fact, if he didn't know better, Jared would think that someone had just dropped a 50 foot radius glob of snot straight on the youma.

"It is I, MUCUS MAN! Who you face now, monster!"

Okay... so perhaps Jared *didn't* know better.

Automatically having recognized it as an area attack, and a threat, the boy in a Santa suit had instantly winked out of existence before a globular mass hit - reappearing on the edge just in time for it to splatter across a wide area, spraying across building fronts, streets, and everything else nearby.

The entire battlezone now dripped disgusting yellow-green slime.

Jared dodged the explosion of snot, spinning with fluid grace he actually danced between the drops, and immediately began to reassess the changed battlefield. On the plus side, with the youma's tailpipe now deep under the mound of yell-green sludge, it was not able to emit that deadly smog cloud anymore. Coupled with some capes using their powers to summon winds, meant that the smog bank was clearing up nicely. Also on the plus side, most of the people had been evacuated because of the smog.

On the minus side, he couldn't get to the youma to kill it without swimming through at least fifty feet of apparently caustic, yellow-green sludge, so strong it was causing building fronts that were caught in it to start dissolving.

~Okay, so this stuff has more than just the gross factor making it offensive,~ Jared concluded in the privacy of his mind, noting that the asphalt of the streets began bubbling as if on fire where the blobs of mucus lay.

~Aaand seeing that building over there had its foundation cut out from under it and was falling over, but is now hung suspended in the snot, that stuff is not *just* caustic like acid, it's also roughly as strong as concrete.~

Yeah. He wouldn't be swimming through that anytime soon.

Not by choice.

Aaand not everyone had escaped the mucus explosion, as told by Michelle elbowing him rather sharply to get his attention to where he viewed the snot-splattered Scouts.

They were the furthest thing from pleased.

Frankly other women would have been biting his head off. The reason he loved these was they were genuinely nice people and better than that. They were not irrational, but actually quite reasonable, enough so they did not outright attack people who hadn't created the problem. The worst reaction he got was Rae's "I'm upset, please solve this" glare.

And even that wasn't blaming him.

"You are going to teach us how you do that, right?" Mina pled earnestly, looking down at his absolutely clean clothes and unblemished face.

On the girls spots of skin were sizzling where the blobs of mucus had stuck. Serena was going wild, dancing and jiggling and wiping, trying to get that stuff off, while others were burning through hankies trying to get rid of it.

"We would have gotten to that lesson already had there not been so many interruptions," Jared reassured her, already in the midst of casting the strongest cleaning spells he knew.

He had taken the whole problem in at a glance and they were clean in under a second. Fully healed and unblemished complexions restored not long after that, then on top of that he added two spells for resistance against acid, in case of any further mishap.

Jared was also the kind of mage who knew spells for keeping clothes clean while crawling through the dust, muck and mire that is standard when fighting monsters in dungeons, and blood and other reprehensible substances were getting sprayed all over the place, so he added those.

He was uncomfortably aware of just how many spells he'd burned through that day, however.

A black parahuman in a red costume ran forward while the youma was snared in the mucus and whistled shrilly, two fingers in his mouth as he stood less than a foot away from the hundred foot dome of mucus - and that had to be some form of sonic attack, because the whole glob of snot vibrated like a bell, powdering most of the structures trapped inside, and reversing some of the youma's progress on its regeneration.

Now able to see their target again, as the mucus was surprisingly transparent, the Blasters again went to work with a will, the newly-cleaned Sailor Scouts again adding their weight of fire to that assault, beams of fire and ice drilling through the mucus to strike the monster.

Jared was running all sorts of equations through his head over the crazy properties that snot must have to a) trap smog particles inside, b) hold up the weight of *buildings* collapsing inside of it, and c) allow the more or less free transfer of energy in the form of fire, light, and even ice rays from the Blasters' renewed fire, when suddenly Velocity appeared at his shoulder and the next second Jared was at an aid station where other people were writhing in agony, having been partially splattered with acidic snot.

"You can heal them, can't you Santa?" some cape at the aid station was asking. "Someone said they saw you heal the Christmas Elves."

Noting that Velocity was already gone, and they were several miles from the battle, Jared's instincts warred within him. His experience at the game table showed that it was far more effective to kill the monsters first, *then* heal up, and some very good math supported that. So he wanted to shout an excuse and dart out of there to finish off the monster.

On the other hand, he wasn't going to get within range for his instant kill shot until the youma had escaped that huge glob of snot. So he had a few minutes.

With a twinkle in his eye and a twitch of his nose, the boy dressed as Santa Claus chained an obscure spell that made wooden wash tubs about the size for a human to bathe in, one at the foot of each cot in that tent, then filled them each with soapy water. Then with another spell he had five little elves made completely out of water standing beside each tub.

Water elementals, though why they had the shape and outline of little Santa's helpers he could not tell you.

Directing a kindly smile to the aid station cape who had addressed him, Jared merrily replied, "One of the first lessons anyone learns when dealing with enough little boys, is that snot dissolves in water. Let's get them washed, so the wounds stop spreading. Then we can heal for greater effect."

And with that the small sized water elementals dragged all of the often-protesting, snot-encrusted patients into the tubs of warm, sudsy water.

OoOoO

Having one self, his primary or real self, trapped at an aid station merely meant this was a good opportunity to flood the area with duplicates, or secondary selves. Because he did not want people knowing about his duplication power, each one cast an illusion, creating a different costume for themselves, and choosing to emphasize different powers - in the hope they'd all be taken for different heroes.

A few illusions (and because he couldn't help himself) most of them were dressed as the Justice League, select X-Men, cartoons, and sentai teams, heroes and villains out of anime.

The science ninja of the series gatchaman, known as G-Force in the US, descended in a starburst formation from above the battle and landed on each other's shoulders like cheerleaders, gradually spinning until in a few seconds they had formed a cyclone about themselves, whose winds they used to direct snot splatters away from heroes and innocents alike.

Another clone, dressed as The Flash, beat Velocity back to the battle site, choosing to run through the entire area *not* covered by snot, picking up things dropped by the fleeing shoppers and taking these packages, presents, purses and parcels back to an empty warehouse on the docks for sorting, repairing, and later returning to their proper owners.

As Jared hard learned from observation, times were already lean enough without that extra blow. But saving people from the minor tragedy of lost shopping was not alone among his good deeds, as after that the secondary self playing speedster began to work on catching people and getting them out of the way of attacks during combat.

The truck youma, which had been struggling to escape the impossibly wide zone of sticky, disgusting and impossibly durable and strong glob of snot had been taking steps with its feet, only to tear the asphalt out from under her in broad strips without budging at all. Finally the creature transformed its legs and lower torso into into a vehicle form, like an odd sort of truck-centaur, and began to spin its wheels wildly.

Why became clear a moment later as cavitation, water within the snot being transformed into steam by the extreme friction, began forming a bubble of air about the youma almost immediately. It was clear that within moments the monster would have a big enough bubble to be able to free its entire body, and perhaps if it expanded that further, break free of the snot prison entirely.

Mucus Man dropped another fifty foot radius glob of snot on top of the monster, but at this point it was clear that was only delaying the inevitable.

While this was going on, another of Jared's duplicates, this one dressed as Batman, used a Fabricate on a bunch of junk yard garbage when no one was looking, creating a metric ton of bat-themed communicators which he then had the Flash distribute, one to each parahuman involved in the battle.

Most people in a crisis really don't know what to do. This went for parahumans as well as for anybody else. Unlike the military, they didn't train for this, so the confusion and noise of large scale battle was as confusing to them as it was for civilians.

Armbands distributed by the PRT just reported casualties, which was no help at all.

The D&D character Jared had gained the power of had some rather special abilities for coordinating allies in a fight. And, as it turns out, none of those had a max limit on the number of people he could organize. So Batman fabricated some computers, got himself a nice little command station, installed that in the back of a Batmobile so he could stay mobile, and began issuing orders coordinating capes for the fight.

Some people took them, and began to see immediate advantages. So more people took them, and the heroic side began to organize along more effective lines - hitting more often, and taking fewer casualties in return, largely because of good positioning and lines of sight.

The youma escaped the first fifty foot radius glob of snot and immediately began firing piston-sized and shaped bullets, only for them to get caught and trapped by a third fifty foot glob dropped right in their path, their inertia destroyed by the sticky goo.

"HA! MUCUS MAN has SNOT for EVERY OCCASION!" that cape shouted while firing his signature Homing Boogers out of each nostril.

Disgust aside, they were quite formidable. Each one hit with the force of a tank's main gun, would pursue a target around corners, and even make a second pass if they missed.

Several New Wave members flew by, accompanied by other blasters (including one dressed like Johnny Storm, aka the Human Torch of the Fantastic Four), dropping all of the collective harm they could muster on top of the youma, to largely no effect.

In response, the youma tried generating another smog cloud, only for that to immediately get whipped away by the tornado G-Force was generating.

Mucus Man dropped a *fourth* fifty-foot radius glob of snot, trapping the youma for a second time, only for an outraged voice to ring out across the battlefield, "STOP THAT! IT'S _DISGUSTING_!"

Eyes turned to the newest arrival, who was dressed as a medieval knight in perfect, shining silver armor. There was no dust, no dirt, no creases to his costume. His hair was perfect, not a strand out of place. His face was clean, his boots were clean. His teeth even gleamed with how shiny, white and perfect they were.

"Oh no! Not now!" Mucus Man recoiled. "It's Sir Factant!"

The knight pointed a plunger at the mucus-garbed man. "Mucus Man! Your Evil Deeds End Here And Now!"

You could hear the capitalization of each letter.

"I will not let you pollute this city any further!" the brightly clean knight declared, raising his plunger into a ready position, as if it were a sword. "Have At Thee!" The knight charged at Mucus Man, his plunger spraying soapy water, bubbles, and sunshine in every direction, erasing mucus, grime and dirt everywhere it hit.

In the back, Constance rubbed at her brow in irritation as she muttered at the nearby Wards. "Sir Factant - another of the greatest capes left in the USA. He has cleaning powers. Unfortunately he simply cannot stand Mucus Man. A sad story. They're both heroes. But due to the nature of their powers one simply cannot tolerate mess, and the other can't avoid causing it. So we get an unavoidable conflict. It's pathological. Sir Factant can't help himself, otherwise he would have been jailed for breaking Endbringer Truce long ago. And we're lucky to have him, since," she swallowed, desperately controlling the urge to vomit, "Mucus Man can create... his substance, but once he creates it it's permanent. He can't get rid of it. So we'd have entire cities coated with... his substance," Constance bravely resisted the urge to hurl. "If not for Sir Factant hunting him down, cleaning up all of the messes left behind."

A tide of soap and bubbles washed past, eliminating the snot, thus freeing the Endbringer.

The fight suddenly got a lot more deadly. A bus got thrown at a group of squishy capes. Luckily, a duplicate dressed as Magneto raised a hand and telekinetically caught it.

Yeah, Magneto's power was magnetism. But Jared had access to telekinesis, and figured that especially in the chaos of battle, that no one would be able to tell the difference.

Cyclops from the X-Men then blasted the next projectile out of the youma's hands before she could throw it, and proceeded to do the same to every other object it picked up, stymieing the creature's attempts to attack at range until it switched back to firing piston-bullets at everyone. And even then, the duplicate dressed as Cyclops was doing a fair deal at shooting those down while a full sentai team got off a multicolor blast at the creature's back - learning in the process that the youma was NOT immune to Daze effects!

While stupid, the youma was not mindless. So it was not immune to the whole range of mind-affecting powers like most constructs were.

Soon it was eating effects of those kinds of every quarter, from a bunch of teenagers in a wild assortment of anime costumes, who shouted out names for their sparkly strikes, and dropping the danger back down as the youma lost most of its ability to reason, perceive, or to plot out what it was doing.

Kitty Pride raced out, phasing through obstacles to fetch back a parahuman who'd tripped in close quarters with the beast, and had been about to have been stomped flatter than a pancake, while Wolverine got up in its face and nasty, adamantium claws going right through the youma's flesh while ignoring its toughness, proving Jared's concept as to its weakness was correct.

Of course, no sooner had the youma suffered a real, damaging hit than it responded with its full, unrestricted force, batting the Wolverine duplicate some miles away.

In the opening thus presented, poor, brave Clockblocker of the local Wards program lunged forward, getting hit in the face by a backhand hard enough to break teeth, but in the process getting a hand on the Endbringer to freeze it for a random but short amount of minutes.

He was lucky. If not for his reflexively freezing time on it, that blow would have had more than enough force to have followed through, taking off the boy's head instead. However, the Flash popped in, getting the damaged teen off to the medical tent before the first drops of his blood had landed.

Of Mucus Man, nothing more could be seen than a steadily retreating battle of bubbles.

With the Endbringer frozen in time, Batman spent those few minutes busily briefing and reordering the superheroes tactics and line of battle into something less haphazard.

Lo Pan emerged, rising up through the street, and began using telekinesis, clouds of debris rising up to arrange barriers for the heroes to take cover behind.

The Flash ran up, wrapping one end of a long string all around the Endbringer, which went taut, as the other end of that string was miles away, in the hand of Clockblocker, who was busily getting healed in the medical tent. But as he could touch the string, and the Flash could tie it around the Endbringer, he could still contribute to the fight.

As she repositioned with her Wards Constance sighed. Having eyes-on an Endbringer was amazingly like looking straight at your own death. So to deal with the stress she found herself following that black cape's example and chatting aloud. "Unluckily, not having full control of himself, Sir Factant can't resist trying to hunt down Mucus Man or clean up his mess no matter where they meet or what they are doing. So we get times like now, when they fall into their own private battle during the midst of an Endbringer fight!"

There was an explosion as the Endbringer emerged from stopped time and immediately tore itself free of the time-locked string, pulverizing the street so it could drop out from the circle of time-frozen string, forced to leave behind its own head and an arm to do so, but tearing free all the same.

Then it was on its wheels, moving fast in and among the heroes.

The Wards shrieked and scattered a giant chunk of concrete, blown off by the explosion, came whirling towards them, only to get stopped utterly, caught in the grip of a giant, glowing, transparent green hand.

One of Jared's duplicates, masquerading as Green Lantern, flew above them in a pair of tights that illusions rendered into a perfect duplicate of the Green Lantern costume, actually impressed despite himself at how wide a range of abilities he and the other duplicates were able to emulate using spells.

It was so flexible, he could even, as it chanced, pretend to have one of the famous Green Lantern Power Rings.

In D&D illusions were a fairly common thing, even the ability to make those illusions partly real using shadow-stuff. Now a vanity choice Jared had taken was the ability to alter the appearance of his spells, and between that and partly real illusions, it was not hard at all to pretend (for a short time) to be an actual Green Lantern, creating green light constructs of objects and animals that fought or helped to fight the Endbringer.

The monster tried lunging right, only to run face first and smack into a glowing green force field that stopped the youma cold. It tried climbing over it, yet found no way to grip the surface, so turned and destroyed a glowing green rhinoceros that had been charging it from behind, before getting pelted by the recuperating group of local Blasters.

Regrouping with the rest who were not very combat-capable, Constance began working her power, spreading it out over as many capes as she could manage. Her name was a subtle joke, sounding like an ordinary name for a normal person, but the name meant "Unfailing Devotion" and that's exactly what her power did - she could keep a group of people on task and on target, working at their best ability whatever their goal might be, and in spite of distractions like fear or a near certainty of death.

If Heartbreaker hadn't shifted the perceptions of the Protectorate so they were a lot more friendly to Master style capes, she would never have had much of a career, probably even forced to go villain if she wanted to use her power. But as it was, she spent most of her time on a rotating circuit between Protectorate HQs training the Wards, as it turned out her power was just about ideal for getting groups of students to study hard and learn faster.

One thing Constance could not do was choose people's actions for them. She only made them more driven, more devoted to what they'd already been committed to. It wasn't a bad power, all told. She could get work crews to reestablish infrastructure in a fraction of the normal time required as easily as she could get teens to study their math or history - and since her power inspired devotion, they'd actually remember what they'd learned later on.

That meant kids with superpowers who had to skip out on study sessions or homework due to responsibilities they had in costume wouldn't have their grades slip up so long as she taught them, which helped keep their identities secret, and was a boon to everyone.

So as far as Master powers, hers was about as mild as they came. She could not inspire anyone under her influence to commit suicide unless that's what they'd already committed to doing anyway. But if soldiers were determined to fight, her influence made them fight better and harder, using the resources at their disposal as best they knew how.

So naturally, once that aspect of her gift got discovered, Constance found herself getting hauled out of the Wards' classrooms and dragged off to Endbringer battles.

It was a curse, but the Protectorate threw everything they could at these things.

OoOoO

Off in a different part of the battlefield, one of Jared's clones was experimenting with just what extremes he could get up to by casting Fabricate with up to a mile radius.

Then he got an idea and was forced to giggle!

OoOoO

In the rush of battle no-one noticed when a small, one-man transport flew across the city. They would never even notice, until someone went back and watched security camera footage, that the Winslow High School swimming pool split apart, right down the middle, water cascading down in twin waterfalls as a two-hundred foot tall giant robot emerged on a raising platform from the now-exposed secret entrance that had been the pool.

The one-person transport lined up, then floated down. As it merged with the giant robot's head it became the cockpit from which Jared's clone could pilot the famous war machine, the very first giant robot piloted as a vehicle instead of tagged along as a friend.

Tranzor-Z.

Armed to such an improbable degree that at times it seemed as if the giant robot was made entirely out of weapons of one sort or another, it also required materials for its construction that were also quite a bit beyond anything that normal materials science had produced. So Jared's clone had been forced to conjure them, and even at his best those were only going to exist for an hour or so.

So he was determined to have fun while it lasted.

Because *everyone* noticed when that giant robot robot took off at a run, then kicked the youma like a linebacker going for a field goal, shooting the comparatively tiny anthropomorphic truck off at accelerations that would have killed it if were human, then Tranzor-Z shot it with heat beams while it was in the air.

That youma crashed down with the force of thunder, outer skin glowing white hot.

Cheetarah, from the Thundercats, raced through at super speed, dumping a five gallon tank of liquid nitrogen over the creature, causing it to shudder and spasm as the entire battlefield heard the great snap of its flesh shattering from thermal shock, the distraction allowing Magneto to build a cage of metal around the thing using his faked magnekinesis.

The Flash then deposited Clockblocker, who lunged in and froze the cage, trapping the Endbringer immobile for a few more minutes.

"ROCKET PUNCH!"

A fist the size of a city bus flew off of the giant robot, smashing down on the Endbringer with force enough to rattle the doors on the civilian survival shelters rated for Endbringer battles before rocketing back to the robot it came from.

The rest of the crowd wasted no time in plastering that monster with everything they had. It wasn't doing much, but they did it enthusiastically, and with the teleporters constantly shipping people in, more capes were arriving all of the time into a gradually growing crowd.

Which, established capes looking around for those reinforcements was probably what got an observer caught.

"You DARE!" one of Jared's clones heard the voice of scorn and turned to see an attractive blonde, floating beside him in the air. At first he thought 'Supergirl?' but the costume was wrong. Plus she was mightily upset over something.

The blonde floated closer, invading the duplicate's personal space in her anger. "You DARE to float here in the back, wearing THAT costume, and do NOTHING?"

Costume? What... oh yeah. He'd forgotten. This duplicate was wearing Superman's outfit. And... yeah, the big blue boyscout would never have just hung out in back when people needed him. The girl had a point.

Using his profoundly high acting skill, he adopted the appropriate mannerisms and responded politely. "Just collecting data, Miss. People seemed to have the battle pretty much in hand, so I was looking for a way to shut that thing down permanently - and I think I may just have spotted that weakness. So if you'll excuse me, please?"

He darted off faster than a speeding bullet.

The Batman double had been monitoring that conversation and sent the signal to another double, this time the Magneto clone, who, just as the time-lock expired and the youma began tearing free, using the disintegrating metal bits to fling the monster high up into the air, right into the Superman double's path.

Superman smashed into it with an uppercut that utterly disintegrated the monster, leaving nothing but sparkling motes of youma dust drizzling down, before even that vanished.

Superman floated there, a small smile in place.

Yeah. Endbringers were constructs, and one of those things his D&D character had was a special ability for destroying constructs. Their density, hit points, none of that mattered. He only needed one good hit to destroy any construct at all.

But he'd frankly he'd had reasons not to, *and* had been enjoying the spectacle.

Hanging out in the back had let him throw out divination spell after divination spell, until he had enough information on that youma that he could have written the Monster Manual entry for it. But it had also let him set up the perfect blow, as he knew exactly where to hit it.

But yeah, the image of effortless dominance had been pretty good.

The Superman double vanished off at high speed, the rest of Jared's duplicates doing likewise.

Moments later, the entire battlefield grew hushed as *both* Tian Shu Zu AND Lady Winter teleported in above the city, silently glaring down at the collected parahumans.

There was no happiness. There was no pity. Cruel disdain was the only emotion felt, as if it fell like rain off of the presence of these two.

Nobody moved. Nobody dared even to breathe as the world's two most dangerous capes, thought to be bitter enemies of each other, floated in close support of each other as they rapidly scanned the battlefield, before departing just as instantly as they'd come.

Children began crying as feelings came to them as if giant predators had just moved past.

It was the first time either of them had been seen outside of their home countries, or their chosen battlefields between them, and nobody was happy about witnessing them break that pattern when those patterns were the only safety from them anyone ever had.

OoOoO

[ALERT]

[ENTITY]

Two giant, mutant, alien, multidimensional space whales had their attention drawn to their most newly created unit these locals termed Endbringers. She had been squealing for their attention for a while, but this latest burst of communication grabbed both of their attentions instantly.

Although the question remained: How did IT find what THEY could not?

The minion pointed towards a battle on which she had been scrying, a mobile disposable unit had been deployed to cause trouble, and the local population had responded in the predictable and usual patterns.

At first.

Then it got weird.

The flaw of their newest Endbringer, of not being able to perceive the target was concerning. Lady Winter would be looking into that, possibly to the extent of refitting the unit to correct the flaw, if found. It very quickly became apparent that greater and greater amounts of data had been missed by the unit's scrying, as more and more events occurred that it could not explain.

Then the probe died, destroyed somehow. Neither space whale could perceive how, even when using their past-viewing abilities. In fact, according to them, this battle should still be going on.

All of their predictive powers agreed. This battle should be ongoing. But it wasn't, and the probe had been destroyed.

Both giant, mutant, alien, multidimensional space whales transported their avatars to the site, but could only confirm the error of their various predictive powers.

[VARIABLE?]

[CONCEALED]

Winter accessed the contents of these humans' recording devices, but could find nothing in disagreement with what their newest Endbringer had scried. Whatever it was, it did not record on any such systems.

Temporarily frustrated, Winter then accessed her shards, many of which had hosts which were present. *Their* senses recorded things, the human eyeballs and ears having accessed the information, and recorded it within their brains.

Gaining complete data on the fight in this way, Lady Winter then reconstructed it, then sent the information over to her partner inside of a nanosecond, the pair of them witnessing that fight through the senses of most every parahuman present.

Both felt a start of honest shock over seeing so many capes neither one of them had empowered. But that was as nothing compared to their surprise when they witnessed one who had been flying in back observing shoot forward and destroy the youma in a single blow.

There really shouldn't be anything on Earth capable of doing that. There really was only one way thing they could imagine that could explain it.

[ENTITY?]

[AGREEMENT]

They had a rival space whale about, and for some reason it was already empowering the inhabitants of this planet, and none of those whom it empowered they could track. And that just wasn't friendly, so obviously this other space whale was trying to kill them.

So they'd just be forced to get it first.

OoOoO  
Author's Notes:

Sorry. I spent the past two months trying to write an exciting, action-filled, heroic battle, and it just wouldn't. At last when I recognized the story inspiration was dying on me, I had to change tacks and let the story do what it wanted (always the best course of action), rather than impose my own will on it. And it could not tolerate the action movie style battle I wanted.

It didn't want dirty, gritty realism. It didn't want hair-raising suspense, or drama, or pathos as this or that person reacts to their something getting destroyed, and it most definitely did not want to focus too much on the locals.

No, it wanted to do something silly. Treat that battle as a farce. It wanted to pants action heroes and fling pies into the faces of adversity.

And so the only true course of action was to let it.

For my own purposes, I have produced a set of rules converting this setting's Endbringers over to D20. For anyone who is interested, here is a summary.

Each Endbringer has 1HD per "layer" they are thick. All Endbringers made by giant, mutant, alien, multidimensional space whales are 200 layers thick. Endbringers produced by other Endbringers (for those who are capable of it) are only 30 layers thick.

When enough damage has been caused to equal one HD, that layer is said to have been breached, or even totally removed depending on how large a surface area was struck.

Endbringers are Constructs, which means they get a 1-10 hit points per HD, but because of dimensional layering shenanigans massively over-empowering them, they instead get 100 hit points per HD. Yes, this does mean that standard Endbringers possess 20,000 hit points - or roughly 50 times the hit points possessed by the avatars of major, war gods.

As if their hit points weren't outrageous enough, the real trick to destroying them is their hardness, which starts at 10 for the outermost layer, then doubling with each layer further in. Hardness stops both physical and energy damage equal to its value, so to destroy the outermost and weakest layer on an Endbringer requires a total of 110 points of damage in a single attack (which is the most efficient way), or 100 attacks causing 11 points of damage each, or anything in between. If you can't cause more than 10 points of damage on your attack, you could strike it an infinite number of times and accomplish nothing.

A long sword does 1-8 points of damage on a strike. Most guns do 2D6, averaging 7.

So the outer layer is perfectly tough enough. But the next layer under that has hardness 20. The one after that hardness 40, then 80, 160 and so on. So towards the end, their hardness is effectively infinite. Well, I could do the math but you'd all get bored with reading the paragraph full of zeros that would result. The point is, even if you could strike an Endbringer for twenty thousand of points of damage in a single hit, the hardness of layer 12 would stop more than that much by itself. Since these layers regenerate very quickly, and everything outside of the core is all cosmetic anyway, overall you'd accomplish very little.

It's been a long time since I played World of Warcraft, so I am more than a bit out of touch as to what top-tier damage potential would be for the Mage class. That fanbase's obsession with damage-per-second actually hurt quite a bit researching this, as number of attacks achieved during a finite amount of time is a completely useless yardstick to measure by when I wanted to know if damage by individual attacks would pass the hardness threshold. In the end I took a ballpark guess and then wrote the scene.

After conversion to the D&D scale I was using, I granted each of the Sailor Scouts attacks doing 600 points of damage (ten times what even a fairly potent top-tier combat spell in D&D is going to do), and they only got to scour six layers off of this beast - and it was a little Endbringer, only 30 layers thick.

Layer seven had 640 points of hardness. Enough to stop their attacks cold.

I did later find a youtube video only two months old of a warcraft fire mage in the latest patch doing arena fights, managing to score above 300,000 damage on individual hits. And you know what? Even if I'd used that total score, unreduced by any conversion, that would only have scoured off 16 layers of an endbringer before repeated doublings of hardness shut down even that kind of damage.

Yeah. The kind of ridiculous power fantasy the source author had to be tripping on to set up their defense that way makes beggars out of even the most wild exaggerations of the most power-mad gaming munchkins I've ever heard of (while at the same time requiring less than a tenth their level of thought - chanting bigger! Bigger! BIGGER! is not particularly demanding). Is this guy compensating for a massive inferiority complex, or what?

Then, as if that were not enough, the other aspects of having lots and lots of HD comes in. One of the standard Enbringers has a base attack bonus of +150, on a twenty sided die! This means they effectively cannot miss unless they choose to, which maps over to their behavior in the series very well. They also get +100 on each of their base saving throws, which again means they fall prey to the powers and effects of others only when they want to. Again, that maps very well over to their behavior in canon.

A little Endbringer, only 30 layers deep and with equal HD, only gets +22 to its base attack bonus, and base saves of only +15. So while potent, it actually has to struggle on a much more human scale to hit things or to resist powers or other special effects. It is possible for this thing to miss when it doesn't want to, or to fail to resist something, it just isn't very likely.

Finally, I gave each Endbringer one point of strength per HD. So the little ones are roughly as strong as the strongest of giants or dragons, basically the strongest things presented in D&D, while the big ones are so off-the-charts powerful they register on a completely different scale, rendering them into an effectively unstoppable force by any conventional measure - which, again, is exactly where the source author had them.

One final matter. The source author did give them a weakness, which it was very difficult for his characters to exploit, and he had only a couple who could do anything about it. But they are vulnerable to any object or power that can affect multiple dimensions simultaneously. In fact, this vulnerability is so pronounced that against it Endbringers have *NO* hardness, and effectively only one layer or HD. So a simple crossbow could shoot a hole completely through one if that bolt it fired could affect multiple dimensions.

His giant, mutant, alien, multidimensional space whales share this same vulnerability.


	13. Chapter 13

Stepping on Worm  
Chapter Thirteen

by Skysaber  
aka Perfect Lionheart

OoOoO

"But what about the Endbringer Truce?" Lita asked, with others chorusing in.

Jared gave the assembled girls a sly chuckle, almost rubbing his hands together. "Ah, the Endbringer Truce, that famous bit of business where no cops or heroes go after any villain for a period of four days after an Endbringer attack, so the villains once more have a chance to hide themselves after coming out of the woodwork to fight." The boy adopted a noble pose, and slipped his halo on. "I have no intention of violating the Endbringer Truce at all!"

The girls blinked, confused.

"But... but you just said you were going to rescue those girls!" Serena insisted.

"Yes," the boy agreed smugly. "And I am."

"Look, I want our friends and teachers from the volleyball club, and those college girls who were captured with us, rescued as much as anyone. But won't that get you in trouble?" Mina asked, puzzled.

His expression grew positively gleeful, and he could not restrain a chuckle. "Ah! But that's the beauty of it! I don't have to violate the truce to rescue them! Those girls are not villains. They are people in danger. I am not going after villains at all when I am rescuing people in danger! Well... so long as I don't burn any villains' faces off while doing it, I suppose. But!" He stood tall in pretended nobility, placing one hand over his heart. "Search and Rescue is a valued and long-established role that anyone may perform during, or immediately after, any Endbringer attack. You search out people in danger - and might I just add that girls who have been kidnapped for prostitution and about to be sold into sex slavery are *certainly* in danger! - and rescue them! Bringing them to the appropriate aid tents... which, just happen to be set up over there! Now, if you will excuse me, please."

The redhaired boy vanished in a puff of dust disturbed by his immense speed.

Locate Person really wasn't on anyone's top ten lists for usable spells. It had a short range, and narrow conditions, not to mention being somewhat costly in terms of level for what it did. Still, mediocre tool or not, it did have some utility if you could meet its conditions.

The spell's innately short range was already something he was expert on tweaking to more usable distances. The other conditions could be filled in this case, and none of the terribly common countermeasures you run into all of the time on more magic-aware Earths had been put into play here.

That made it easy to find those kidnapping victims.

He almost beat the gangs to their hideout.

it was only due to their rather large head start that he didn't do exactly that. As it was, Jared arrived overhead as the very first gang trucks were pulling up to the loading dock of a very large building, a high-rise hotel with its own attached mall, that from the looks of the rest of the population milling about, only the gang members could see.

Jared made a mental mark of the location for later.

It was rather telling that gang members in their signature outfits and with assault rifles stood openly before the entrance, yet not one of the civilian pedestrians passing by, or the cops walking beat, gave them so much as a second glance.

Had to be a parahuman power, or some tinkertech device installed there. Either way, it obviously made for a great base for the gang.

Still, a simple Knock spell opened the doors on those trucks while they were still parking, and by the time the rifle toting gang members got around to the backs of those vehicles to unload them of their screaming and crying cargo, their kidnapping victims were already gone.

College girls, and members of Mina's volleyball club, still in their uniforms, began to appear at once in the aforementioned aid tents, where workers, recognizing the signs of people delivered by super speed, and presuming them to be just more people rescued from shelters or the rubble, began to pass out blankets and hot beverages.

Cider was one of North America's popular hot drinks of choice nowadays, as they still grew plenty of apples.

And, being scrupulously honest, Jared didn't punch one villain's face in while doing it. He was rather proud of his restraint, at that.

He just marked the gang HQ's location for four days from then.

OoOoO

Outside a window in the PRT Headquarters, a building once described by Clockblocker as half office building, half bunker, smoke still rose from the destruction in the city. Cleanup crews were at work, and hospitals overstressed and crowded, but the fact there still was a city, or a PRT Headquarters building in it for that matter, was felt by most a cause for celebration.

For the first time in human history, an Endbringer had been destroyed. Not defeated, not driven off as all other successfully repelled attacks had done. Destroyed.

A sizable chunk of the world population was going to drink itself into a blind stupor tonight in celebration over that one fact.

Casualties had been surprisingly light, as well. One-quarter losses among the defending capes was the norm. Here, they hadn't even suffered one-tenth. No one knew the exact figures yet, as hospitals were still processing patients, but whatever the number was, it was going in the record books as the lowest casualties ever suffered under an Endbringer attack.

Tomorrow had already been declared a national holiday in recognition of that fact, and their first ever true victory over an Endbringer.

It wasn't even Christmas yet, still just the Monday before when Christmas didn't come until that Sunday, yet already the bars were open, carefully horded bottles were being taken out of hiding, and, frankly, the celebrations were probably going to push past to New Years day.

Or until the alcohol ran out, whichever came first.

But there were those who could not afford to celebrate at all. In Director Piggot's office, the blinds were down and the windows shut, and close to a dozen monitors had extended down from the ceiling and were now presenting the grim faces of the other PRT Directors around the country.

"Today marks the first day Tian Shu Zu and Lady Winter have been seen outside of their respective countries."

The voice coming over the teleconferencing monitor, while normally deep and professional, was high-pitched and trembled with barely suppressed terror.

"We still have no workable contingency scenario!" One panicked cry added, cutting above the rest.

The implication: 'we're all doomed' was understood by all.

"It also marks the first time an Endbringer has been destroyed. At this point, all we can hope is they were drawn by the novelty of that event, and will return to their normal practices," another voice assured.

It was the first time anyone had offered a voice that could be termed reassuring, and every person attending the conference of PRT Directors, either in person or remotely, seized on that fairly slender hope as a lifeline.

Anything else didn't bear thinking on.

OoOoO

"Oh, man! Giant Robots! I've lived to see Giant Robots! And Batman! Man! I'm gunna keep this thing forever!" Clockblocker carefully caressed the bat-communicator he'd been handed by The Flash, in a surprisingly good mood for someone wounded and occupying a cot in an aid tent.

A stern PRT official came around, and held out his hand for the device.

Clockblocker found some spine, lifting his chin and saying, "Heroes of DC comics showed up and blew away an Endbringer. You are *not* taking away my personal memento of the greatest occasion in Earth-Bet's history! You can have my resignation first!"

Half the aid tent cheered.

The trooper drew himself up into a good Officer Vader impersonation. "Regulations..." he began.

"Screw your regulations!" Clockblocker shot back. "Today I tagged an Endbringer. I stood beside Superman and The Flash, and helped cause that thing to die. You think you can bully me after that?"

Now the cheers came louder, and more people began to poke in the tent door, concerned over what they were hearing from inside.

Surrounded by unfriendly faces, and chagrined over the lack of support, the PRT official made an inglorious escape.

"And tell Piggot that I quit!" Clockblocker shouted after the man. "You sent me in to die but I didn't! So now she can find her child soldiers elsewhere!"

This time the final roar of approval came even more pronounced.

OoOoO

Michelle smiled as she gazed out across the room filled with her happy, celebrating friends and family.

Lita had made another meal, their last having been hours ago, and this time their families all got to enjoy it with them. Jared, or as some had started referring to him Jay-chan, had been right, their parents were unharmed, and resumed motion just as the rest of the world had come unfrozen. They had trusted him, but everyone was happier now that trust had been confirmed.

And they had more reason that most to celebrate, as now Michelle and their friends and family had a future.

Before they had hidden, run when they could and fought when they must. But they all had known it was just a delaying game, that eventually the gangs or the general collapse of their world would catch up to them. That had almost been today, twice in fact. Both terrors of their lives had come upon them, the gangs and the Endbringers, and been put to rout today.

Michelle allowed her gaze to lay fondly on the man to whom they owed both victories. The one to save them from rape and enslavement by the gangs, then spared them again by near-soloing an Endbringer.

No, they were not going to let that boy go anytime soon.

He was the antidote to all of their misery, the cure for all of their world's ills, as near as they could reckon, and they would not be letting go of that, or the hope that he represented, so long as they had life or strength left in their bodies.

Mina had snatched him up just on finding a cute boy who could make clothes, and that had been every bit as wonderful as she'd hoped for, but he was so much more than that! He'd given them all powers like it was nothing, guided and inspired them, helped them all to fight an Endbringer so they'd emerged without one lost among them, and now he was in the midst of telling their parents how he might move them all to more secure accommodations!

No, he was so much more than clothes. He was their angel, and they were going to keep him, and that was that.

Michelle had personally resolved to do whatever it took to see that happen. But she also noted with both amusement and joy that she was far from alone in their group for deciding that. They loved him and trusted him, and he naturally responded to that. Michelle knew enough of the ways of the world, she could tell where this was going, and they would all be wearing wedding rings soon.

She could hardly wait.

Finishing her little chore that had drawn her temporarily away from the group, she rejoined in the happy throng, secure in the knowledge they had hope.

They had a future.

OoOoO

"...in a surprising turn of events," the TV news anchor was saying, over a scrolling banner headline saying only ENDBRINGER DESTROYED! in all caps, with all emphasis added the techs knew how to add, "heroes out of Marvel and DC comics appeared to aid in the Endbringer fight, which culminated in Superman felling the creature with a single blow, after Santa Claus and others had engaged it for several minutes. Although none of these comic book heroes stayed around to be interviewed after the fight..."

A remote got raised and the television silenced.

"Well, it wasn't one of the Big Three Endbringers," Suit A summarized, "however, our Tinkers and Thinkers have looked over both the fallen tissue samples as well as the fight footage, and can agree it was a genuine Endbringer. Perhaps not as powerful as the Big Three who have been plaguing us, but that's hard to say, since this one didn't stick around for very long, so comparing the scope and scale of the disaster it caused to the others would naturally leave it falling behind."

Suit B just steepled his fingers, still watching the dozen or more news sources, still reporting the same thing, all in practically identical language.

When news sources ran out of things to say, they didn't shut up. They just said them again.

The situation was unlike anything anyone had ever heard of. No one knew quite what to make of it. The entire world was in a state of shock, that numbness that precedes the real reaction to a sensation most of your mind can't handle yet.

They had Hindus and Muslims who would be celebrating Christmas after this if Santa Claus could appear and take on an Endbringer in a one-on-one battle that ended in the Endbringer's destruction, even if the Spirit of Christmas fought it only briefly.

Santa was also among the only ones to have soloed an Endbringer and survived. By that measurement alone the jolly old toymaker rated as a tier one cape, whatever other abilities he might be holding out of sight.

That the jolly Spirit of Christmas had more than one Christmas Elf in his support retinue said all kinds of things about him, most of which they hoped were true, because if this was some secret cabal of high-level Tinkers then government spooks would be raiding it and recruiting some decently high-value capes at gunpoint within the week.

"Do we have some high level flybys of the North Pole planned?"

Suit A chuckled. "Given how closely these Tinkers care to match their theme? Those flights are already in the air. We detect heat plumes from any hidden North Pole facilities, or pick up anything on our ground penetrating radar, and the capture teams are ready to move within hours."

"Good," Suit B agreed, leaning back. "Now show me the recreations of the Superman footage."

Cameras hadn't worked to capture any of these new capes, which was infuriating, but the techs were doing their best to recreate what must have happened, editing back in people that the cameras simply did not catch. They assured him it was accurate, even if the results did look a little cartoony.

Superman's part in that battle was less than a second long. That brevity was almost as impressive as the results that came from it, as it said that whoever this Superman was, he was off-the-charts powerful.

Especially if he could do everything that the comics said he could.

Debate was ongoing, but they were pretty sure the analysts were considering Superman for a slot on Tier Zero, which made his recruitment all sorts of appealing to every nation on Earth.

To say nothing of the PR angle.

"Has our search uncovered any Kent farms in Kansas?" Suit B inquired.

"No, but we've got our space telescopes working overtime checking for any explosions that might have been Krypton, and we are already cataloging all meteorites that have fallen to Earth since the thirties."

"Excellent. We must know; it's a matter of National Security." Suit B tapped his fingers together. "No Kents, but what about mild-mannered reporters in New York?"

Suit A shook his head. "Sorry, that's a dead breed. America hasn't got any reporters that could be termed 'mild' in New York or anyplace else. They actually train that trait out of them. But I've got hold of people who have lists, rating our press by how rude and obnoxious our reporters are, and we've launched investigations into anyone who rate in the bottom thirty percent of obnoxious or rude personalities, assuming 'mild' is relative, that is."

Suit B was not impressed. "We can do better, surely."

"Well, I'd hand the Daily Planet to you on a silver platter, but unfortunately we have no such newspaper." Suit A apologized. "Newspapers have been dying out in favor of first radio, then television, and now internet news sources. Most of the ones left have been bought out by the major conglomerates, none of which match the Daily Planet's MO."

"Wait, is there a blog named the Daily Planet? Or anything similar?"

"Yes, and we've already arrested her. But she doesn't fit the profile. Nevertheless, we have her in questioning now."

Suit A swiftly checked some files. "However, investigations are ongoing into any and all millionaire playboys in Detroit or Chicago. If we can turn up Batman, he'll lead us to Superman for sure."

OoOoO

Teleconference over, Piggot was scowling over some photos.

There was a giant hole in the ground behind Winslow High School, one centered around where the school's pool had split in half to reveal a secret, underground bay out of which a two hundred foot tall robot had launched.

That hole was currently surrounded by PRT troops, naturally, who were investigating what they could. Photographs of corridors and gantries filled her desk, along with maps quickly sketched out, revealing an entire facility below ground.

Director Piggot's scowl deepened slightly, though only an expert on microexpressions would be able to tell, as her typical expression was a pretty deep scowl to start with.

"Tell me again what you found," she ordered.

Armsmaster had been reviewing his own files, helmet-cam footage and the like, from when he'd led the PRT scouts through the buried launch facility. "A plainly military installation was constructed under Winslow High School. One complete with cafeteria, dormitories, and all of the necessary support infrastructure for approximately two thousand residents."

"And you have no idea who did it?" she repeated doubtfully.

"None," the dry Tinker repeated without emotion, most of his attention on reviewing his own helmet-cam footage. "There are no identifying marks of any kind, and no records, either paper or electronic. The computers we found were completely wiped and randomized, not even an operating system left. There were no fingerprints left on any surface, nor DNA of any kind. Not even any serial numbers left on any of the equipment we have discovered."

"And what equipment was discovered?" Piggot growled, angry at the whole situation.

"Forklifts, trucks and loading gear, the usual support machinery, nothing you'd suspect of being out of place on a military installation."

"No Tinkertech?" she demanded.

"None, of any kind," Armsmaster distractedly repeated his answer for what to have been the fifth time.

Piggot slapped her handful of papers down onto the stack of the rest angrily. "So the only thing special about this base, is that a giant robot launched out of there earlier today. Nothing else, aside from the minor fact it is located under a fairly typical high school, and no one knows how it got there. Is that it?"

"Yes." Armsmaster gave her bored acknowledgement, infuriating her further.

"So someone built a several billion dollar installation right under our noses without anyone having the least hint of what was going on, built a robot in it, then threw that base and all of the secrecy that went into making it away on a single combat launch?"

"Yes." Armsmaster again gave her the same bored recital.

"Wonderful!" Director Piggot threw her hands in the air in celebration so sarcastic it was downright caustic. "And then, despite having next to no warning, and the fight itself lasting no more than a couple of minutes, after this launch they evacuate all of their personnel, leaving no hint of a trace behind. Is that what you've got for me?"

When Armsmaster gave her no answer (seeing no need), she growled out loud, "Chief Director Costa-Brown is going to tear me a new one over missing something that large. Now I can't even tell her we've got a lead on who did it, or why Winslow! For all we know a little fairy named Tinkerbell could have twitched her little nose and *wished* that whole base into existence!"

She spent several moments grumbling over how unfair that was, building up steam towards a truly terrible combination of headache and temper tantrum when she spied a new paper poking out under the rest and pulled it out. "What's this? Footage unavailable? What's going on down there? I ordered the labs to prepare briefing material on those new capes an hour ago. What do they mean 'footage unavailable'? We have cameras all over that portion of the city. Even an Endbringer can't have destroyed all of that data, could it?"

"I have been reviewing my own helmet footage," Armsmaster at last told her. "And I cannot find any record of even one of these new capes, even briefly. I can see the people they rescue being moved. I can see the effects of some of their powers taking place, walls coming into existence and so on. But I am reviewing now for the third time, going frame by frame in many instances, and the capes themselves simply do not appear on my recording, either as sound or visual. Their cameras probably suffer the same effect."

Piggot glared at him for a second before growing even more hostile. "So now we have a Stranger rating to throw on top of the pile of that Christmas Elf's powers, is that it?"

"There were hundreds of new capes present," Armsmaster reminded her. "Really, it could have been any of them."

Her eyes narrowed. "And that makes it better?"

Scorn dripped off of her every word.

OoOoO

Jared was busy setting up the island tower he'd constructed so it would be comfortable enough for everyone to move into.

Certain niceties like indoor plumbing would be appreciated, he was sure. But more than that, what he really wanted was to get those workshops set up and running.

Because say what you want about soldiers on the front line, it was infrastructure that made the difference between an army of peasants with pointed sticks and farm implements, and the modern soldier with his carefully machined and refined battle gear.

No points for guessing which one was more effective in combat, either.

The economy for magical soldiers worked similarly. There again, the best combatants had the best gear. But to get the best gear required the best tools, and there they were starting with nothing but their bare hands and magic.

Thankfully, it was amazing what a mile-radius Fabricate spell could do. For instance, one of his doubles having come up with the idea to use Tranzor-Z in the fight against that Youma, had used one to not only build the 200 foot tall giant robot, but a base under the swimming pool of a nearby high school to launch it out from. And the spell had simply created out of local materials everything he'd imagined as part of it.

And D&D wizards devoted tremendous effort to mastering the skill of Concentration, so he could imagine quite a bit, and hold that very complex picture in memory while casting. So zing! One very detailed base to go along with one very fantastic robot.

Gathering the raw materials had been as simple as using one Fabricate to transform some of the huge piles of junk lying around the rest of the city, either in the abandoned warehouse districts or the Boat Graveyard, and he had more basic stuff than he knew what to do with, not to mention leaving those areas denuded of refuse, and thus substantially cleaner.

He was sure someone would notice eventually that whole blocks of the city had no metallic garbage strewn over them. But who cared?

What could they even do about it?

A quick couple of castings of Major Creation had netted him some decent sized piles of very exotic metals that did not exist outside of fantasy worlds, and so he'd been able to transform them via Fabricate into a giant robot that could not exist by ordinary science - because it had metals whose tolerances could not be believed by local metallurgists.

Sadly, he could not create those exotic materials permanently, so they'd vanished in less than an hour. But then the giant robot had only needed to last for a couple of minutes for that fight. It's disappearance afterwards he was inclined to view as a feature. No matter where people looked for it now - it wasn't there!

Talk about not leaving evidence.

And speaking of not leaving evidence, Jared once more had to congratulate himself on going for D&D powers. Warcraft classes were fine for most fights, but for sheer versatility D&D was practically unbeatable. It had a spell for every purpose imaginable - including some that most would probably never have imagined otherwise. And being an expert on that system he knew that versatility and how to use it well, so included a bunch of oddball things as standard.

For instance, as part of his Archmage's Defensive Spell Suite was one out of the D20 Modern system that rendered the subject undetectable to any kind of machines.

Staggeringly useful in any modern setup, where nearly everything got recorded, then those recordings got analyzed by experts, combing through to reveal details you never thought they could have gleaned.

No, information was power, and the first lesson that ought to be learned out of that was "Always deny information to your enemies".

But no, most idiots would rather stand there in combat explaining how their powers worked.

Sigh.

In stories and other media authors had to explain what was going on so his audience did not give up in disgust over the confusion and frustration he'd keep piling on them otherwise. But to use, as your expository measure, a guy standing there in combat proudly explaining to his enemies how his powers worked? Often including his weaknesses?

Lame!

Anyway, once he had D&D powers he'd applied the "machines don't detect me" spell over himself and his allies as part of a simple precautionary measure. His hundreds of duplicates had shared this protection, and he was planning to keep this up as part of his routine forever, as in modern environments you never knew who was going to be your enemy - and most databases were so compromised that whatever one learned was soon enough known generally.

But back to the tower he was building, and its purpose.

Fans of the Warcraft MMO had long known that game was all about the gear; that if you had the same class and level as another person you'd be identical, so the only place to shine was in what equipment you wore. There were some other trivial modifiers, but those were intended to balance out and thus not be very important.

An insider at the corporation had even admitted that two characters of the same race and class at max level, each standing in their underwear, could fight and basically reach a draw every time (someone would win, but it was mostly up to the random number generator to decide who, and the survivor would be nearly gone) - but that if one of those people geared up, that one could fight six or seven, sometimes even eight or nine, people who were otherwise identical but without equipment, and win every time.

It was also a truism that no matter what your gear, it could always be improved.

They hadn't had much time in Azeroth, and looting Archmage Medivh had not yielded them everything they could have used. Basics, yes, but no frills. Nice as that loot had been, it had not given them an infinite budget, just a very large one. So, nice as the top-tier sets of equipment he and the girls he was courting had made for themselves, not only had they room left for a very large amount of tweaks left to do - gems to socket and enchantments to make, and so on, but those girls had families they'd doubtless like to be protected too.

Because, using those skills gained from Warcraft, Jared and the girls had an absolutely PHENOMENAL ability to create hero costumes! Maxed out Tailoring could create some pretty good costumes on its own, cloth armor with all sorts of buffs inherent - the only thing on this planet that could compare was Tinker-tech. After all, who else could create a hat that actually made you smarter? Or stronger? Or, as levels of Tailoring skill increased, all of those plus more?

An ordinary person might have anywhere from 10 to 60 in any one particular stat on the Warcraft scale, but a good piece of gear might easily raise that by hundreds.

Put those on strength and ability to absorb damage?

It just so happened that a decent set of Warcraft gear could make for a fair approximation of Brute powers, by the local standards. Nor could he think of any one of those girls who'd object to having their family members harder to kill.

But of course, after having these workshops constructed, they would again need more raw materials before being able to make those costumes.

Hmm.

OoOoO

Jared positioned himself in front of the group. "Ok, girls. As you know, D&D characters (and Warcraft, both), need items to reach their full potential. To get those items requires raw materials, and to get those requires you either gather them yourself, which can take months, or if you want to spare yourself that time they require loads of cash. We are adventurers, so that means the traditional mainstay, and our primary source of income, is to kill bad guys and take their stuff."

He tapped a map of Brockton Bay. "Since windfalls from looting evil archmages are sadly uncommon, we'll be exploring more reliable methods, and that means picking out a source of evil and making war on it until it is very, very sorry, broke, and probably dead. I've picked out a good starter target, a contemptible group of thieves and kidnappers who push hard drugs on kids by force: the Archer's Bridge Merchants."

He stopped when unexpectedly, Serena raised her hand. "But..! You said yourself. They recruit new members by force! We actually know some guys, kids we met in school, who got kidnapped and addicted, had to drop out and and now work for the Merchants."

Lita was nodding along. "Yeah! The big thing about the Merchants is that most of their members did not want to join."

"They just didn't have the willpower to break out of it once hooked," Mina added.

"That's right," Amy chirped in.

Rae added her own fiery support. "We're not going to kill innocent women and children who just got ambushed and forcibly addicted! Okay, so they may be doing wrong now, but beating addictions is tough, and those Merchants know to use drugs that are hard to kick, since they know that probably half their members would vanish if they could. They depend on that leash of their own addictions to keep the gang together."

Jared started rubbing the back of his head. "Okay, new plan. We can't kill them. But that means a rescue operation, and detox, which means subduing everyone, and while that can be done, where do we put them all once we've taken them prisoner?"

"Couldn't we just hand them over to the police?" Serena asked, touching her lower lip in a display of genuine innocence.

The redhaired young man almost chuckled, but stopped himself short, as her question was genuine and he didn't want to hurt her feelings. Thankfully, Michelle eased in to state, "No, that wouldn't work very well. Official channels have an almost zero success rate."

"Oh," Serena wilted, looking despondent.

Jared was already thinking rapidly. "Okay, we've got enough magic that we *could* cure all of them. However, to do that large a scale, as we're talking several thousand people here, would either take us most of the year, at which point it's easier and simple just to go gather the raw materials we need directly, or we've got to build an item that can do mass healing, and those are always expensive. So our need for cash only increases."

His shockingly blue eyes went heavenward as he pondered aloud. "Taking down the whole gang and curing them one by one, casting the spells ourselves, would go so slowly that most would go through withdrawal and be clean before we'd even reach them. Building the item would be faster and safer, but we'd have to get the money to do it first, which means taking out the gang before starting creation of the item, as the whole point to taking down this gang was to get the money we needed. Either way we are looking at holding several thousand people prisoner for an uncertain length of time. Give them to the police and they'd get dispersed to prisons all over, we'd never get to the healing part. Hmm..."

He lowered those blue eyes to the group again. "We can do it. But to do it requires not just subduing the gang members, but taking them and holding them for a while. Our tower just doesn't have enough space. Several hundred? Sure. But not several thousand. So..." He tapped his fingers together, thoughts racing and eyes drifting skyward once again, before snapping his fingers and smiling. "Got it!"

His smile was infectious as he illuminated the whole group with it. "We are adventurers, and so the medieval theme is kinda big for us. The traditional place for keeping prisoners in a medieval setting is called a dungeon. And, it just so happens that one of the things Leet taught me a recipe to create during our shared game experience is a little artifact known as a Dungeon Heart, that lets one construct a dungeon as large as one likes in so little time as to be beyond belief, with housing and food and jail cells all provided for."

He smirked. "Even better, since I didn't like the 'Be Evil And Laugh About It' theme to the game the Dungeon Heart comes from, in the van where we were talking about it, Leet threw together programming for me to have a Hero's Heart - the good-aligned counterpart to the regular Dungeon Heart he and Uber wanted to play with. In the game a Hero's Heart is nothing more than a target to be destroyed, so I had to beg and plead to get a build list and economy programmed in for one, but they did it."

He shrugged confidently. "I haven't built one yet, not having had the time, but I have the plans, and it should be fairly easy. I could whip one up in just a few minutes, as the big parts, like the massive crystal, I already have spells to create."

"So you can save our school friends?" Serena perked up.

"How soon can you get started?" Amy asked.

Jared opened his mouth to reply, thought about it, and closed it. "How about right now?

OoOoO

Author's Notes:

Dying sucks. Especially when it's long, drawn-out, and miserable. I'm sure I have been in more pain than even my worst enemies would have wished on me, and I invite them to experience this for themselves if they are of a different opinion. But oh well, winter is over for now, and so I haul what's left of this diseased carcass that was once my body back to the keyboard to write.

Sorry for the delay folks.

On another subject, good reading material has been getting rather a bit scarce of late. It used to be there were hundreds of new chapters of Harry Potter stuff appearing daily. Now it can easily go months without seeing even a dozen. Same with Naruto and other once-popular genres. So, in a search for something decent to read, I have begun branching out.

Given that good reads are hard to find I thought to profit by the excellent example certain other authors have set, in making a recommendation to my readers who might be trying as hard as I to find some good new material.

I did this once for "A drop of poison" but that seems dead now, too.

However, for anyone who has ever played the old Star Fleet Battles game, based on the Original Star Trek, or even just likes Star Trek AUs in general, this is an interesting story:

Trader Joe of the Neutral Zone.

It's event-centric, not character-centric, so don't let that surprise you. The author, I am told, is something of a history nut, so it reads somewhat like one of those military histories he likes, but in Star Trek.

I'd put in a link direct to it, but as far as I'm aware this site still rigorously strips those out.


	14. Chapter 14

Stepping on Worm  
Chapter Fourteen

by Skysaber  
aka Perfect Lionheart

OoOoO

Jared alighted in one of the worst sections of Brockton Bay's urban sprawl, a spot deep in one of the gang-ridden hellholes of abandoned buildings that the police wouldn't go near without parahuman support.

Jared considered it ideal, as at least this way he'd be close to his customers - ie, the gang members he was going to be putting in the very dungeon he was about to start.

A quick spell and he had for himself a summoned dire badger, an animal about the size of a large dog that was also one of the most effective earth moving tools ever devised, as it could dig through dirt at more than a foot per second and leave an intact five foot by five foot tunnel behind.

And that was when they were not hurrying.

Jared had selected as his starting location the deepest basement he could find in this area without putting too much effort into it. It was a double-basement under a collapsed building. There were vehicle ramps all of the way to the bottom level, but the whole was choked off with debris from the fallen building, trash and garbage that had drifted in, and waterlogged from years of rains that had never drained out, now frozen into ice and with a thin layer of paradoxically clean snow over the top of this garbage heap.

The concrete itself of the basement retaining walls had been giving up the ghost, gradually crumbling and breaking down, leaving holes in those walls where ice had broken cracks and then later enlarged them.

The place was not just worthless, it was a hazard.

But the best place to hide has always been where no one wants to look.

For Jared, it was simplicity itself to transform into a hawk and circle the place a few times, memorizing its details from every angle with that superior hawk's vision, then land and cast an illusion of that site exactly as it was, in perfect detail, using Permanent Illusion.

Now he could make any changes he wanted, yet the exterior would always look the same.

Some quick Fabricate spells later, and the core of that mess, fallen building parts and all, was rendered down into ingots of metal and blocks of stone, all stacked in neat little piles ready for consumption. The outer five feet or so of the wreck and ruin he'd left exactly as it was, in case drunks or whoever loitered around would brush up against the illusion. He wanted the actual feeling of the mess to still match the appearance for any casual observers.

Lots of mages tripped themselves up by forgetting little details like that.

A few Wall of Stone spells later, and the basement retaining walls had been repaired, all but a single section that he intended to use as the entrance to his new dungeon. Other spells followed and the basement floors reassembled themselves up to ground level, draining off the accumulated wastes into new sewer links and becoming habitable again.

The entrance prepared, it was time for the dire badger to go to work.

One fifty foot shaft sloped down at a comfortable angle, and a rather substantial starting area for his dungeon already dug out beyond that, and the mage was ready to begin.

The walls of this newly dug area were simple dirt, which would not last long under normal circumstances, but he already had the fix for that. In the course of the Dungeon Keeper game, the Dungeon Heart spawned imps that would render most walls invulnerable, and since Leet had promised something equivalent, he presumed he'd soon have something similar.

Soon enough, he had the Hero's Heart created. It was actually quite beautiful, a head sized crystal of pure white enclosed by the same kind of goldwork that made up the most famous British royal crowns, topped by yet another jewel, this one purple and the size of his fist.

The whole thing glowed with an internal light that pulsed in time, like a heartbeat, and suspended in place by golden statues of mythological horses.

Neat.

Almost no sooner had he completed the thing than it spawned its first servitor. The evil version used imps, but true to Leet's word he had reprogrammed this one to serve a more heroic theme, so Jared was completely satisfied to see a small flying cherub emerge forth and await his orders.

Oh yes, he had some big plans for this one. He began to issue instructions right away.

Having looked up the figures, Jared know that Brockton Bay's official population numbers were 350,000 people. Obviously, this would be down quite a bit from the days when the city had a robust economy, but those were the figures now.

Also one of the official numbers, though one they were careful not to talk too much about, but the city had a fifty percent unemployment rate.

Now, call him vain, call him foolish, but Jared supposed that if one in eight of those unemployed people were gang members (which those experts on criminal behavior he had consulted all assured him was a *very* low estimate - every last one of them had, first thing after hearing that estimate, flat out told him the actual figures would be higher), but still, suppose it was only one in eight of the unemployed that would join gangs. That left Brockton Bay with a tidy estimate of twenty one thousand, eight hundred and seventy five gang members.

Obviously, those would be spread out among the total number of gangs. But still, divide it up further. Say that, for every major gang with high visibility, you have roughly a dozen small gangs not terribly important outside of their own little neighborhood niche. They don't have a lot of influence or control, in fact most people living in the city are not even aware of them. The minor gangs just stay in their own little areas and do their own little thing, so only those living basically in contact with those small patches of territory even feel their influence.

On that assumption, say that half the gang population goes to the big gangs, which makes them few but large, and the remainder gets divided up among the minor ones, which being so numerous means they are much smaller, and thus comparatively weaker and ineffectual as far as gangs measure strength.

Still, if you had, say, three major gangs about, they would, going by those figures for Brockton Bay, average three and a half thousand members each, going from the official statistics and his, admittedly lowball, estimate.

That's a lot of people to try and imprison, and he'd need a very large dungeon.

Fortunately, the more gangs you had the smaller each one would be, having to divide the total available membership further. After all, not everyone was willing to join a gang. But on the downside, the one he was targeting, the Archer's Bridge Merchants, had a reputation for being completely indiscriminate about who they forced to join, and forced addiction and recruitment was sort of their calling card. It was kinda what made them stand out.

They'd take anyone, whether you wanted to join or not.

However, for all they were a very large gang, they actually had very low cohesion. They were a bunch of doped-up losers, by all estimates, with almost no cohesion beyond their shared drug dealing and additions.

Low power, also made it hard for that gang to control territory. So they mostly just fit in the cracks in between what the other major gangs wanted.

Those two things, their large size and relatively low power for that size, had originally been what caused him to select them for his target. The Sailor Scouts were still new to the whole hero business, so they needed something low key, and not very dangerous, to cut their teeth on. And Endbringer fights did not qualify.

No, they needed something relatively calm and mild to get the bugs worked out, learned what worked vs what didn't, and in general just pack some experience on so they knew what they were doing; and he wanted them to do so under as safe conditions as possible. So taking out low power thugs with almost no cohesion was ideal. And the size of the gang meant there were that many more to take loot from, so they would solve their money problems at the same time.

But it also meant he'd need a LOT of prison cells.

OoOoO  
Car Wars

Jared crouched and leaned into it as the roof of the van he was riding on canted crazily as the vehicle went into a high speed turn, followed by autocannon shells whipping through the air around him as he cranked the amps higher and pulled off a riff on his electric guitar.

Death sports were all the rage in the Car Wars world, actual death being so close at all times things like football were just considered too tame anymore, and the crowd in the arena went wild as Jared escaped yet another close shave at the hands of the enemy team's weapons.

Going 'pedestrian' in conflicts where armored vehicles were the norm was considered about as safe as fighting a lion armed only with a sheet of paper. Suicide, but exciting to watch, and the longer you lived, the more the crowds appreciated your daring.

Really, the mage wasn't in any more danger than the driver of the van he was riding on, but the audience had no way of knowing that. A spell on his feet kept him from flying off, and many more kept him protected as he performed this stunt, actually making him safer than the paltry thickness of plastic armor made the crew of the vehicle he was riding on.

Jared tossed a concussion grenade with an impact fuse over the side of van, to land right as a pack of motorcycles zipped around the bend in pursuit after them, the explosion doing minor damage to their armor and tires, but also devastatingly knocking the motorcyclists out from the overpressure. It might only be for a few seconds, but seconds when you are racing at sixty on a motorcycle was more than enough. They crashed and rolled.

The stadium crowd simply went berserk.

Really, Jared would feel awfully bad about this if the contestants of both teams did not have clones ready to be revived from right after the event. In fact, last match he'd even been bought dinner by one of the enemy team he'd killed. So it was odd to say the least. They were in a real fight with real weapons, but no one took it any more seriously than a game of rugby back home.

Sure, you got hurt, but it didn't last.

Frankly, Jared considered that whole attitude stupid, and he would not be here at all except for one tiny little detail, and that was that civilizations are made of people, and to lead people required a certain level of reputation with them.

The Car Wars world was a mess. He could fix a lot of that. On his first day here he had, in between skill programming sessions while they'd been switching tapes in the machine, gone out and used spells to fast plant and grow hundreds of acres of fruit and nut trees.

But those trees were valuable, so immediately after he did so these idiots went out there to fight over them using their standard weapons - including lasers and flamethrowers, and it all went back to dust and ash again faster than he could build it up.

So out of those hundred or so acres, barely a dozen still stood.

People here were kind of numb to destruction by this point; too jaded to care. Anyone who got too fussed over nihilistic annihilation had gone catatonic ages ago, so the few folks who were left did not really have much in the way of delicate sensibilities or scruples.

Or in other words they were crazy, bloodthirsty morons. About the only thing they respected was when someone proved himself even more crazy, bloodthirsty or moronic than they were - which explained why Jared was out here, in the arena, playing a guitar as he rode on the roof of a van in their death sports, building up an image as the most insane freaky nutcase he could think of.

It made him popular.

Jared had to duck a volley of machinegun fire aimed for his head, but didn't let that, or the anti-vehicle mines that the van he was on hit, slow down his guitar playing even as he had to flip in place to regain contact as the van buckled and he went momentarily airborn.

Lacking front tires, the van was screeching, skidding to a stop below him, just as a couple of sleek and heavily armored sedans on the enemy side rounded the corners of the road in front of them, their turrets already swinging to track the doomed van. Hopping off to get behind the ruined van only seemed sensible at that point, but he still didn't let it interrupt his guitar playing.

Being popular, and having money, meant that when he did decide to get a forest planted, he could actually hire folks to protect it, and give it a halfway reasonable chance to survive in his absence.

Because there was no way he was staying around here.

Oh, he could. In fact it would be easy. He might just be a magical copy, but he appeared quite real in every way. That meant he had a genetic pattern, and so long as he did these guys could copy it, create a clone body based on it, and read his mind into it.

He could easily have a real flesh-and-blood body to stay here as long as he liked. But he didn't want to.

Jared just felt no reason to stick around.

Frankly, there just wasn't anything in this world to love. It was not a nice place. Still, as something of a parting gift he had been going out planting trees and bushes and vines by the thousands and fast-growing them into mighty forests. But he was doing it on small islands and in hard-to-reach mountain valleys, and even then installing defenses and hiring guards over them.

Which was fine while he was here, and 'the boss', but these guys did not have the kind of corporate or business mindset so popular among working class employees in the 20th and 21st centuries where the boss could be an ocean away and lower ranks still carried on doing his business. No, what they had here was a more tribal mindset, where maybe they'd work for you if they respected you, but fat chance of it if your back was turned.

But they might serve a legend. So he was building one.

The van exploded as twin lasers intersected on it, sheering through the armor and cooking off the ammo. The crew inside perished, but they had clones. Thankfully the van's rear armor held while Jared dashed inside of a nearby building.

Of course, this being an area fight, that building was a shot-up wreck so full of holes that it offered a little less cover than cardboard.

The fans were going wild over this.

Other cars from his own team were apparently all tied up elsewhere, and they might lose this match. But whatever. Jared already had some of the hottest skills anywhere on this planet, having started off these arena fights with the best skills money could buy, then only refined them under fire from there, doing crazy stunts not even people with clones would pull - like riding into a fight playing rock music on a guitar while standing on the roof of a van that accelerated and turned like a demented weasel.

But the crowds loved every insanity-dripping second of it, of course.

After his first couple of arena fights, it had gotten out that Jared did not have or use a backup clone, and since he'd only signed up using his first initial: J, the local media had dubbed him 'Cloneless Joe', and it made his extra-dangerous escapades all the more thrilling to the violence-fueled thrillseekers that lived here.

"Oh, yeah! Cloneless Joe does it again!" was a frequent cheer he heard.

Stowing the guitar at last, as the amps had been burned up along with the van, Jared pulled out an RPG and a grappling gun, using the latter to swing between two buildings while he fired the former one-handed at the two heavily armored sedans with the lasers.

No, he didn't expect to hit anything, but it was rather dramatic.

In fact, he didn't even get a shot off, the barrel of his rocket-propelled-grenade launcher having gotten caught on one of the straps of his backpack, and he was too busy struggling with it during the swing to fire.

The sedans split up, one going to cover each side of the building he'd just swung to so he could not escape. Then suddenly one of the sedans, the one driving under his swing path, hit some mines and exploded, not having noticed that Jared's struggle with the RPG was merely a cover for dumping out the anti-vehicle mines he'd had in his backpack over the road as he'd swung by.

Jared was already pounding up the stairs at a fast run as the remaining sedan fired its laser in several shots through the ground floor. But luckily, even holding himself down to human limits, he'd already taken in the full spectrum of athletic programs, and gotten Really Good at running! So those shots missed.

The 'train you by programming skills into your brain' tech was expensive, but Jared didn't care about that. On his way into town that first day he'd used Make Whole to repair a beat up van found at the side of the road, lost and looted from some attempt at a caravan long ago, then he'd conjured pure wheat into sealed containers, driven into the largest settlement and sold them, earning himself a massive fortune overnight.

So he had all of the money anyone could ask for. Sure, he was spending through it at crazy rates, but who cared? He couldn't take it with him - with the Grain Blight on this place he was never going to take anything physical away this planet anyway. And he could always conjure more into existence. But it sold for crazy rates among people who had never before eaten grain.

Immediately after getting that fortune, he'd gone to get some skills programmed, and with his ranks in Concentration as a D&D mage he'd been slurping that programming down like a hungry child given an infinite pass at a candy shop.

So their science was no longer a mystery to him, and the two most critical bits keyed off of something he should have suspected.

Algae.

Jared vaguely recalled having read an article years ago about how some guy or other had figured out how to make oil just by growing algae in tanks and pressing it, squeezing out drops of precious oil. He hadn't thought much of it at the time, but apparently these people had.

Did you know that the first guy who thought he could get oil out of the ground by drilling for it was laughed at and ridiculed and considered a kook?

Back then everyone knew oil came from whales.

Anyway, algae was how this Car Wars world solved their major problems, got their major food mass, and oil for their plastics. They grew it in big tanks and ponds, everywhere they could really. It was their life.

It was also wholly immune to the Grain Blight that had killed off most everything else edible.

So the people of this world had gone into aquiculture in a very big way. Fish farms out in the middle of their deserts, you name it. If people lived there, they had ponds and big tanks of water stuck in buildings growing fish and algae for their food, then even more algae so they could press it for oil, and so make all of the plastics they used for everything.

Rather simple, really.

Also, sometime during the collapse of civilization around here, someone had come up with 3D printing, gotten it widespread, and since major industrial manufacturing did not exist here, they had expanded on that printing technology with everything they had.

Thus they used plastics for everything because plastics were easier to print with than metal, or anything else.

That was all, really.

Their technology base was nothing more than growing tanks of algae they then squeezed for oil, which oil they processed into plastic, which they then used in their 3D printers to make everything but their food. And even their food was mostly fish and more algae.

Every step of the process had been reduced to where the entire cycle could be, and was, contained in a simple set of appliances that could be had in every household!

3D printers had replaced TVs as the appliance everyone had to have. Every household had at least one; and having more, or larger, or better ones than your neighbors did was a mark of pride and prosperity, just like better TVs had once been. Oil refineries made out of scavenged and rebuilt water heaters transformed the oil they pressed from algae into plastics they could print with, and that was it.

People had swimming pools, not to swim in, but specifically to grow algae in. Pools and ponds were considered safer than aboveground water tanks solely because it was less likely for a few stray shots from a nearby duel to rupture them and let the water out.

Anyway, that was their tech tree.

Any late 20th Century technology base probably could have done the same, only they didn't have to. For them it was a fringe technology, mostly pursued as a hobby. But not around here. Here it had mostly replaced the local store.

They hadn't had any choice. With next to no real infrastructure, if they didn't print it, they couldn't have it. So it had gone way beyond domestic uses. These guys printed cars. They printed guns. They printed lights and electronics, and... well, if it existed here, they probably printed it. They even had specialized printers producing plastic clothes!

Sure, the cars and machineguns and electronics they printed were not as durable or high quality as the stuff that could be produced using a dedicated manufacturing industry; and the performance really suffered, but when the choice was to have something, or nothing at all, it was always better to have something, right?

That was the choice they had.

Jared wasn't about to argue about it. If all you had were stone knives and bearskins, then everything you made used stone knives and bearskins. That was the way people worked. He was paying more attention to his surroundings as he got to the building's roof.

The sedan down below had not stopped firing its laser through the ground floor - probably shooting out the load bearing supports, plotting to bring the entire building down, letting him be crushed by the rubble as it fell.

Well, that wasn't very nice of them.

Quickly shouldering the as-yet-unfired RPG, he steadied the launcher before squeezing the trigger, sending the light anti-tank round down into the roof of the black sedan below. Top armor was almost universally ignored, there being only so much weight a vehicle's chassis could carry, and most other areas being higher priority. So it was no surprise when the blast from the rocket went right in through the weak upper plating.

Hmm, not enough damage to kill the car, or shut off its laser. Something, or someone, in that car surely got cooked, but whatever, or whoever, it had been wasn't very vital.

His own team wasn't anywhere to be seen, and he was running out of options - if he didn't want to break out his Out Of Context powers, that was.

Another support got cut, and the building sagged, bricks exploding away from one face of it as the structure they'd been tied to twisted and warped. The roof canted beneath his feet, and he was forced to rely on the grapple gun again. He took it out, glancing away as the daylight reflected off of the stainless steel casing.

He'd built it himself, using magic, before he'd known what an anachronism it was. Both it, and the spool of steel cable it used.

Locals used the absolute minimum metal they could get away with, as metal was hard to work with using the tools they had, so expensive and used only where necessary. Also while printers were ubiquitous, they had very few patterns.

Needless to say, toys like his grapple gun were not among them.

No, the people who'd done the programming to create the very few patterns the locals had and used had different priorities. But whoever they'd been, they hadn't been programming long before something shut them down.

So, unlike in a modern world, where you could not walk into a store without seeing shelves covered with dozens of different variations of whatever thing you were looking for. These people had a Light Pistol, and a Heavy Pistol. That's all. And every Light Pistol was just like every other Light Pistol, because they'd been printed according to the same pattern.

These people did not have the luxury of hundreds of minor variations made by a dozen different manufacturers. There was one light pistol design, and that's it.

So even where things could have been done better by a dedicated engineer, they didn't, just getting things done the inefficient way because almost no one had the engineering skill to fix flaws in those patterns and make them better.

Nor, it had to be admitted, did most among this crazy bunch of wildmen care all that much. What they had worked well enough for their purposes, and if someone with massively more resources could have done better, so what? It's not like they had those resources.

So their machineguns did not fire as quickly, or as accurately, or pack on as much punch as the ones made even as early as World War One - and they had to be water-cooled to prevent them from catching fire even at the rates they did perform. And the techniques used to make them did not scale up well at all, so the autocannons and other big guns they used were quite frankly pathetic for their size.

But better than no guns at all, to these guys' minds.

And if their one design for a printable van template was not efficient or optimized, so it had poor performance, could not carry very much weight, and used its internal space wastefully, so what?

It's better than having no van at all, right?

So, Car Wars was really just Mad Max with 3D printing thrown in, advanced to a really high degree out of both practice and necessity, but capped by a lack of people making new or optimized designs. So they had some supply of replacement cars and parts and did not live as a total scavenger society.

Their solar cells really were as good as advertised, though. Some real geniuses had, during the collapse, thrown away patent law, gathered all of the best technology that worked, grouped it together, tried out some combinations, made some more discoveries, and got some truly incredible performance out of them.

Better still: they could print them.

The laser technology they used was also quite brilliant. So good he had to wonder whose secret lab they'd raided to get it. They could even 3D print half of the parts, and what small industry that did exist outside of 3D printing could supply the rest.

And that explained why some shipping still happened, as while most things could be made out of plastic, some laser parts and stuff still couldn't, so to get them they had to order those in from the few places still retaining enough of the old technology base to make them, and those shipments were valuable, so got raided by everybody who wanted what was in them... which was everybody.

So, yeah. A barbarian culture armed with solar cells, printers, machineguns and lasers.

Oh, and practical cloning technology. Can't forget that, or the brain-machine interface that made it possible to read and copy who you are - and also read and program skills. They also had fireproof plastics, and a few other nifty tools, as leftovers from a collapsed culture.

Jared fired off his grapple gun and made the swing, escaping just before the building he was on collapsed out from underneath him.

The enemy cars had, of course, been waiting for him to do exactly that, and fired, mostly missing, but as the laser passed in front of him, the gunner having shot just a touch too early in his eagerness, Jared got struck from the side by a new vehicle he hadn't been expecting, a pickup truck that had just come around the bend.

He really didn't see anything more as, while the shot from the pintel mounted machinegun in the pickup's bed did not kill him, it did shred the plastic local armor he'd been wearing and set him to spinning.

Sensing death close, the stadium crowd went into frothing madness as cheers redoubled in their strength.

Then again, stunts like this were exactly how he'd built up a reputation as 'Cloneless Joe' - the guy even crazier than the rest of them. So honestly, he couldn't blame them.

Really, it was amazing they had retained as much civilization as they had, but Jared still didn't want to live here. And there was next to nothing to keep him, as it was not a nice place and he was almost done absorbing the sum total of everything they could teach him with their skill implanting technology, having started with their science and technology, then followed that with all of their practical know-how from being a skilled mechanic and electrician, to how to accurately shoot guns and drive a vehicle in combat. Really, at this point he was left studying Art History, as that was the only skill left they hadn't already programmed into him. But he figured that he might as well pick that up while he was here.

He had written out a will, in which the least-insane and closest-to-resembling-respectable group he could find got all of his farm territory, along with the accounts so they had money to keep the guards paid until the harvest came in. Considering the paltry local diet, the fruit and nuts and other things growing there ought to sell for vastly more sums of money than needed to keep it running from there on out.

Jared stood behind a window. Having unlimbered his guitar and sighting down the neck of it, he fired three shots into the armored pickup before having to duck return fire caused him to drop prone.

Having a basically unlimited budget, and all of the engineering skill almost no one else around here had, of course Jared had built a weapon into his guitar. He'd drafted the pattern to print it himself, just to prove those newly-gained skills of his worked, and his choice of boom-stick had been a gauss rifle. Heavy, but hard-hitting, and it's not like he cared about the expense!

Already, the oh-so-secret 'Gauss Guitar' pattern had been stolen and gangs all over the place were printing their own.

Like that wasn't anticipated.

The pickup and black sedan had already been joined by two more vehicles, a subcompact and a short bus, and they were all arrayed around his current shelter, the sedan still sinking laser shots into cutting each of the support columns, while the others waited, obviously positioning themselves to shoot when he appeared on the roof again.

Which was why Jared leaped out of one of the blown-out empty window holes, landing right on top of the roof of the laser-armed, black sedan.

The crowd went positively nuts as he inverted himself, sticking his head and shoulders down into the hole he had blown through that roof earlier with his lone RPG shot.

It was surprise that got him. He hadn't expected his secretary, the woman who did almost all of his paperwork, to be the one driving. And from the look of what was left of her, the passenger seat and gunner had been her office mate. That delay was just long enough for her to raise her own gauss rifle and blow apart his head like a melon.

Oh well, it's not like he would miss that world.

And, due to the way Leet had programmed his Shadow Clones to work, the original Jared back in that worm dimension suddenly got all of that magical copies memories.

Mission accomplished.

OoOoO

Author's Notes:

The algae thing is real. The process I'd read about was not competitive with commercial oil operations, but in the absence of those operations it would really take off, don't you think? Provided that someone remembered it, that is.

The numbers for the size of Brockton Bay, and the state of their employment, are also drawn from the original. It was real professional, expert opinions I sought on gang behavior who told me my guess of "one in eight" of those unemployed joining gangs being low. So twenty one thousand and change would be the minimum number of gang members they would grant to such a place. Realistically, it would probably be much higher.

Especially with gangs doing involuntary recruitment, like the ABB and Merchants (two of the major gangs in the Bay) were doing in the web serial.

Frankly, the Archer's Bridge Merchants have every excuse to be one of the *largest* gangs in the city, even if they are among the least powerful, just because they'll take in anybody - whether you want to join or not.


End file.
